Will iTunes 9 Follow Pandora?

With the recent launch of iTunes 8, a lot of pet peeves people had were taken care of, but C|Net looks at how a few things could be further improved in the next version. One cool new feature in 8 is the Genius List, an over-glorified ‘shuffle’ so-to-speak, which is a bit more intelligent when calculating what songs to play. After all, it might be a bit weird if at your dance party, Johnny Cash came out of nowhere.

That feature is further-improved by way of Genius List, which works like similar services out there (Pandora, Last.fm, old-fashioned research) which captures data from their servers that recommends music you might like. What C|Net hopes to see is a subscription model put in place with iTunes 9 to allow limited or unlimited playback of the recommended songs… because let’s face it, 30 seconds is not a lot of time to experience what a song is made of. Sometimes I have to listen to a song three times through before I even realize I enjoy it.

In my opinion, iTunes needs this feature to be improved. I’m a big Last.fm fan and one of the main reasons is simply because it’s been able to recommend me music I didn’t even know I liked. I’d probably accredit that at least thirty CD’s I’ve bought over the past two-years have been due to using that website. So not only would an improved feature like this on iTunes improve the user experience, it would help fill the music industry’s greedy pockets even more!

At the moment, these recommendations are available only with the usual 30-second preview, but it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach, living in parallel with the pay-per-song approach Apple has successfully used so far. Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service, and the Genius Sidebar seems like a simple way to step into that approach.