My Problem with Ping!

Last night, after I was finally able to download iTunes 10, I had a moment. Or more accurately: I totally wigged out. Not in a good way. Ping, the new social/music discovery feature in itunes, made me completely fucking tea party crazy:


When I woke up today, I spent some more time playing with it this morning, wanting to give it another chance. It was still bad. But I was able to understand why it caused me to have such a visceral reaction.

Music is identity. Or it is for very many of us. Whether it’s jazz standards, or punk rock, the type of music we listen to, and identify with, tends to say something about our personalities. Often this is mere projection, but whatever, it’s there. Even for those of us who might transition seamlessly from trance to Afrobeat to baroque to southern California hardcore to bubblegum pop to country all in the course of one playlist, music is identity—in that case you like all kinds of music, perhaps. And in Ping, Apple has mis-identified us.

When Apple tells me I like Shakira or that I’m a fan of Justin Bieber, or whatever other horrible piece of shit it throws out there, it’s like it introduced me by the wrong name at a party. No, it’s worse than that.

It’s more akin to Apple telling me that it’s sure I’ll be friends with a bunch of people because we all support Prop 8 and puppy torture. Your reaction to this is, naturally, something along the lines of: What? Really? OMG, fuck you! (But Lady Gaga for the win! Ra-Na-Na, motherfuckers!)


And I think it also bothers me because Apple should know better. I’ve been using iTunes since it was SoundJam. Over the years, it has collected data on tens of thousands (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) of songs that I’ve played. So when it then turns around and acts like we’ve never met me before, I take it personally. “Hey old pal, forgot about me? What did you do with all those letters and mixtapes I sent you over the years.”

The Music I Like thing was particularly egregious. All are in my library, but not one of them was a direct hit. And, frankly, I find the Phish dominance just puzzling. I’ve been using Last.FM/audioscrobbler since 2005. Virtually all of the 60,000 plus plays it has collected are from iTunes. In that time, I’ve apparently played Phish 21 times. The Doors? They don’t even show up in my charts. I did buy a Doors song recently (LA Woman) to listen to on the drive down to Los Angeles. But I never even played it. 

Ultimately, Ping screws up much in the same way Google Buzz did. It takes years worth of data (or doesn’t!) and uses it to make completely wrong assumptions about me. I think, maybe, it’s a function of being overly ambitious, and certainly overly presumptuous. No, I do not want to be friends with my parole office on Google Buzz. No, I do not want my friends to think that Shakira is one of my favorite artists on iTunes Ping.

If you follow me on my various social media things, you know I’ve been really into Rdio. It has problems, but I’ve found more new music via its social discovery features in the past two months than I likely have in all previous years combined with services like Last.Fm and the like. One key, I think, to its success is its lack of presumption. It doesn’t say, “you’ll like this.” It says “here’s what your friends are listening to.”

Yes, we do live in a digital glut, and yes, I do need help with discovery. But it’s always better to open doors for me than to shove me down a hallway.

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  1. iheartmicroblogging reblogged this from unrequiredreading
  2. cmykate reblogged this from emptyage and added:
    turn Ping on, well...neighbors internet and it’s...spotty....
  3. unrequiredreading reblogged this from emptyage
  4. pseudocolin said: Everyone seems to be assuming that Ping is drawing on or even has access to a vast library of listening data - what if it just doesn’t? What if, you know, Apple has actually been respecting some sort of userdata privacy? I honestly don’t know.
  5. emptyage posted this

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