Ping sucks because it’s popular to say it sucks
Following some tweets in the recent days, it doesn’t take long to find out that industry critics don’t like Ping all. It quickly became popular to say it sucks, because everybody says it sucks.
What surprises me though, is that some investors and social music network founders share the same view too, while their field of view should be a little wider.
We all know that in the process of growing, iTunes became a very slow over-bloated software — but iTunes is also the world’s largest monetization music platform and Apple obviously wants to strengthen its position for everybody’s sake. Currently, they went for a restrictive approach (intentionally, or just not enough time to develop better?) with Ping and it may eventually fail as a social tool alone if it’s not going to be more available. But in this analogy, you could bash Facebook that it was only open to university students at the time. If we’re going to bash a social network, why drawing conclusions today? If it’s meant to be social network, then it needs time. I don’t think it’s great, and it probably also doesn’t work like everybody would expect.
However “restricted”, what would one expect from a multi-billion music (among other areas) company with an audience of 160M registered users? A new last.fm? Maybe the internet doesn’t need a new last.fm in Apple’s design. Most of the people don’t want to listen to radio. They just want to buy their favorite music 1-click. I think the world primarily needs a place to buy mainstream music quickly and discover it too, whatever software it’s tied to. iTunes continuously forces major labels to wake up. The sooner it goes worldwide and breaches all legal barriers, the better for the whole industry. Even if it establishes a monopoly, the current situation is worse anyway. Discovery as Ping is suggesting helps establishing iTunes as the best place to buy music. Current social music networks do not sell music in the terms of how iTunes does.
Maybe Ping really does suck and Apple doesn’t understand the social network game at all. Maybe Facebook execs have been money hungry and couldn’t close a deal (or vice versa). Still, industry insiders should extend their views and not play the childish social network terminology game — just because they can’t invest in it or just because they like last.fm approach more. It needs time. If time is not going to help, I will join all the critics. But not today.
