Greg Sandoval over at CNET wrote a post this week that poses the question -- “Steve Jobs -- a music visionary?”The CNET post almost seems to grade Apple’s performance in the music business against Steve Jobs’ past predictions for the future of digital music. Jobs’ predictions were given in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine in 2003.In the CNET post, I believe Greg Sandoval subtly inferrs Jobs is a visionary because iTunes now has a whopping 75% market share of digital downloads selling about a billion songs every six months.I enjoyed reading the predictions Steve Jobs shared with Rolling Stone . However, I wished the CNET post took the focus off of Mr. Jobs and instead posed this question -- “Is iTunes itself visionary?”. It certainly is a very important distribution platform with a large audience and array of content. Artists like myself certainly do everything we can to make sure our music is available to this large iTunes audience.I wish iTunes would become more visionary though. What do I miss in my iTunes experience? In my opinion, there is a simple answer -- discovery and community. I understand there is the Apple “Genius” feature which recommends songs and builds customized playlists. I’m talking about a deeper sense of discovery focused around content, lyrics, credits, bios -- and community around that very same content. Maybe its on the iTunes roadmap. In the video below, I talk a little bit about what I mean with regards to a deeper music discovery and community experience. Please watch, and feel free to share your own thoughts on your own digital music experience in the comments.
Vision and the Music Experience
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Chuck, Let me sit down with you to show you the discovery and community with Zune. That’s what Zune has been focused on since the beginning.MichaelTome rhymes with home.
Michael, that sounds like a good idea. I do need to play with the Zune platform, and it seems like there is an area called ‘The Social’.Just remember, it’s a lot easier when I am trying to sell my own music to point people to iTunes since the install base is so large, and also because people have more experience with it. In addition, my own music is easy to distribute to iTunes because of enablers like TuneCore. That’s why I was talking about the large audience at iTunes, and how more discovery and community tools would help artists and record labels sell more music and find new fans.Also, I have to be honest – so far the Zune install process has been cumbersome; I was just going to try it out. I got an error – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949420?sd=zune – and I’m hesitant to do anything new to this laptop.
Well, isn’t that one of the things that Pandora is supposed to be great at – discovery?I’m not sure that Apple is the one to deliver community. While people love Apple – and the brand itself has a community of fans – there never has been a community from Apple (if that makes sense). For me, I find music through various sites, and find that Ning has done a great job building communities around stars (or, well, the stars themselves are building the communities, such as Lupe Fiasco on Ning).
Jeremy – Thank you for your comment. When you wrote here has never been a community from Apple”" – you validated my overall point here. I just re-read the Rolling Stone interview with Steve Jobs from 2003, and Jobs never once mentions discovery and community. And that’s the bulk of the music experience today – discovery and community. So just how visionary was he when it comes to digital music when he failed to identify those trends or build experiences like that into his products.You mention that you find music ‘through various sites’. I do too, and I enjoy finding new music that way. However, I just wish it wasn’t such a hackneyed experience and that there was more cohesion around music discovery. Also I wish discovery would be more integrated with my music playback experience. I don’t always have the time to read 100 blogs.Regarding community, I was talking less about the specific community around an individual artist, and more about the community experience regarding listening to music. For instance if I listened to a Lupe Fiasco song, my music player, be it iTunes or otherwise, would tell me about the others in my personal network who are also listening to the song. And maybe even during playback of the Lupe Fiasco song, it would then point me out towards his communities.”