noncoherent

Ping’in ell

So PING sounded great, one of the first headlines I read was “Ping, final nail in the coffin for Myspace” I hate Myspace so couldn’t wait to download iTunes 10 and get cracking.

First of all it didn’t like my photo, a jpg on my desktop. OK so many people wouldn’t necessarily like a picture of me but I’m sure Apple aren’t that biased. No matter what type of image file I gave it, all I kept getting was, Error uploading image.  The next stage I completed was my music genre preferences, after completing this I made my profile live. The first artists that PING recommended where Lady GaGa, Yo-Yo Ma (a cellist), U2, Jack Johnson, Katy Perry and Linkin Park. Now I’m pretty sure none of those are Electronic artists so this is yet another way of being force fed who we should be following.

It appears that artist profiles are currently by invitation only, I spoke with AWAL our aggregator for iTunes and they informed me that they would be getting access to create profiles however Apple are limiting the numbers and will only initially be for top grossing artists. This hardly allows true discovery potential that us indie artists so desperately need. 

Alan Wilder emailed me to ask how he could create an artists profile for Recoil, like the Muse one he used as an example. This is what he had to say when he learnt of the process. “seems they all threw teddy’s in the corner and pulled the facebook links at the last minute. And where’s the Artist page function? Only for the big boys for now - typical elitist shite from Apple”.

The fact they have already screwed up the Facebook share thing makes me wonder if this is really going to work. Already they are favouring the most popular artists so at the moment I just don’t think we stand a chance. Shame.