Loading ...
Yesterday’s announcement of new iPods and a new version of iTunes revealed one biggish innovation on Apple’s part: Genius, which is Apple’s attempt at integrating last.fm/Pandora-like “recommendation” functionality into the music player. So far, it seems a bit imperfect to me: It’s claiming that I’m “missing” songs that are next in line on my playlist; and its recommendations get a bit more dicey the further your listening habits stray from iTunes’ best-sellers list. Kevin Maney at Portfolio wonders if the meh-ness of the products Apple unveiled yesterday is a sign that Apple has hit the wall, innovation-wise, in music, but Marc Cohen at Ad-Supported Music Central takes his argument one further, saying that the whole industry is in the doldrums, at least on the business side.
Artists continue to create great music but the business and technology people in the industry don’t seem able to come up with any inspired new applications. More colors, more gigabytes and more music discovery options are just more of the same.
Innovation driven by a solid business case (not just the “we can do it, so we might as well” imperative) is what the music industry and the technology companies with music products and applications – need but are sorely lacking.
Now, Cohen is a big advocate of ad-supported music (as the title of his blog might suggest), and I know that he’s frequently agitated for newer distribution methods that require people to pay for music with time; I suspect part of the innovation he’s looking for involves models that embrace these ideas more successfully than, say, SpiralFrog. (Whether or not those ideas will ever bear out in the bottoming-out-as-we-speak music marketplace is another thing.)
But taking his complaint one step further, “more colors, more gigabytes, and more delivery options” could be extended to “more bands releasing singles via video games,” “more bands patting themselves on the back for releasing records no one would buy anyway via the Pirate Bay,” “more remixes of mildly popular bands’ songs sponsored by companies,” and so on, and so on. Sure, the fatigue on all sides probably stems equally from the double-whammy of the business being hit hard by people abandoning the idea of paying for its project and the economy, and while “hooks” like these may not be all that interesting once you probe deeper than their attendant press releases’ second headlines, they’ll definitely get press from the more story-hungry types out there. I guess what I’m wondering is, what can happen next? Is the “free vs. paid” music argument ever going to move beyond its current stalemated state? Will plastic guitars become the new Neo Geo once 2009’s holiday season rolls around? And will the real, game-changing innovations happening now not be visible to the naked eye until three or four years down the road, when the reverberations of things that may seem minor now bowl over society, and I’m going to have to hope that more pop stars have onstage tantrums in the meantime?
Has Apple Hit The Wall In Music Innovation? [Portfolio]
Hitting The Wall In Music Innovation [Ad-Supported Music Central]
I’ve been curious about the “Genius playlist”. Sounds obviously like just a way to get you to buy more songs from Itunes, but do you get to listen to them at all? A “missing” song means one they recommend you buy?
@MayhemintheHood: Well there are two implementations of Genius.
* The sidebar: suggests songs you haven’t bought from the iTunes Store by the band, as well as songs by other artists that are in a similar stylistic vein. Only works if the artist and album are “known” — TV On The Radio’s Dear Science, for example, didn’t bring up anything because the album isn’t in iTunes’ daatbase yet, I guess.
* The playlist: Basically a somewhat more calibrated version of “Party Shuffle,” only it’s based around one song. (I just tried it with a Siobhan Donaghy song, for example, and it put together a playlist with Sugababes, Robyn, Kylie, and Belle & Sebastian’s “Legal Man.” A playlist centered on the Shackletons basically collected a lot of generic “indie.”)
Sounds sweet. I am hoping to get a new iPod Touch, as well as this new iTunes…just wasn’t really sure what the Genius stuff was all about.
I haven’t installed iTunes 8 yet, but I’m interested to see how this works. I wonder how long it will be before someone complains about “privacy”, because of course iTunes has to communicate with the store’s database for “songs similar to X”, and Apple got heat with iTunes 6 and “the Mini-Store” because it sent information to the store about stuff you were playing in iTunes.
[www.boingboing.net]
Also, can you confirm whether this only works with tracks purchased from the store, or does it also work with imported MP3’s that have good tags?
@Rob Murphy: It works with all tagged MP3s. But the data on the album has to be in the store, and it has to have a sufficient amount of data to come up with suggestions. For example, I just clicked on a song by the Stickmen, and the sidebar came up with zero matches.
IMO, Genius is hit and miss on working in general, but when it makes matches I’ve been happy with the results.
As to this article’s “Apple and the Industry have hit the wall” theme; I’m ok if there is a couple years of downtime on the music tech breakthroughs. We’ve come a long way since Apple changed the game in ‘01 with the iPod. I might be time to let those parts of the industry that have been slacking catch up to what the rest of us have been on.
How much innovation do people expect? What was the music player innovation between ‘82 and ‘87, dual cassette decks, hiss reduction and auto rewind?
@Audif Jackson Winters III: and don’t forget fast speed dubbing!
@Mick Kraut: Ummmm…. You have to very specifically turn Genius ON. It does not come with it turned on by default. It doesn’t assume that you want it turned on, it asks you if you want to turn it on, and it’s super simple to turn off.
That being said, it gets a big “meh” from me at this point. To be fair, it’s new, and Jobs specifically said that it will get better as time goes by and more people use it. That still doesn’t change the fact that almost 1/3 of my music collection isn’t on the iTunes store, making Genius worthless for those songs.
@Audif Jackson Winters III: I can’t tell if you’re making a joke or not, but wasn’t this the timespan where people started to catch on to the notion of the CD as a mass-market item?
@natepatrin: Well, I was and I wasn’t.
But CD players were developed and came out as a consumer item in the early 80s … and remained a rich person’s toy for most of the next decade. The fact that they got cheaper, and eventually more people bought them, doesn’t represent a technological innovation, in my view. At least in the way that the linked article seems to be demanding.
I installed iTunes 8 last night and the first thing it did was completely wipe my iPod…3 years of finely tuned playlists and play counts lost…not too happy let me tell you…
It took me 3 tries to turn off GENIUS, it keeps assuming you want it…I dont know if that is why it deleted the unit or not.
Has anyone else had issues?