Taking Apple’s Ping Social Music Service for a Spin

With its launch of iTunes 10 last week, Apple also launched a new social music service, “Ping”. Does that sound like a generic name? Well, it is, and believe it or not, the company prevented future legal hassles by clearing the usage of the name from PING Golf, which retains the rights to it when used for social networking and other online services.

The goal of Ping is to allow music lovers to meet and share information about themselves and their taste in music, and the hope is to discuss and discover new tunes. The service is opt-in only, which is nice, and as you fill out your profile, you’ll be able to put in a little bio, and choose up to three favorite genres. Some might find that difficult, but the choices aren’t too specific, so you could choose one category and have it encompass other sub-genres.

Before you complete the profile setup, you need to choose what kind of information you want to share. The default is that all updates will be made to your profile, such as purchased songs, or songs that you’ve rated, liked or reviewed. When people visit your profile, they’ll see a blurb “Music (Person) Likes” which will show some album covers from your favorite music.

Upon completion of your profile setup, you’ll be recommended some artists and people to follow. Oddly, my personal recommendations couldn’t have been much further from my actual interests (I had Keith Urban as a recommended artist and I highly dislike country music). But the recommendations don’t matter that much, since you can easily search for artists you’d like to follow.

Unlike services like Last.fm, Ping has a likeness to Twitter, where if you follow an artist, it’s because they actually created a profile and plan to keep it up to date. So, even if an artist is available on iTunes, it doesn’t mean that there will be a profile available. If so though, all you need to do is follow them, and then on the main page of your Ping profile, you’ll see a list of recent updates, similar again to Twitter.

After using Ping for a mere couple of minutes, I felt immediately underwhelmed. I had kind of expected it to be a Last.fm killer, but that’s hardly the case. The profiles are all rather simple, and lack the ability for the community to add things typical of similar networks, like artists photos, tags, YouTube videos and all the good stuff that’s quite useful when seeking out new artists to listen to.

While services like Last.fm enable people to really search and discover new music, Ping’s main goal is to just earn more money by littering profiles with “Buy” buttons. Anytimeone a friend or artist recommends a song, it gives you one-click access to buy. That’s fine, but when it’s as blatant as this, it detracts from the entire experience, since you realize it’s all about money and nothing else.

I mention Last.fm because it’s the service I personally use, but there are other services like it out there, and all of them offer far more flexibility and interesting features than Ping. As the service just launched, though, it’s expected to be a bit “empty”, but still, features are lacking. Whether we’ll see features similar to those that users of other like services use, we can hope so. But for now, I don’t see the point of Ping at all, except to get you to buy music – and you sure don’t need Ping for that.