Apple Gets Into Social Music Scene with My iTunes
Michael Arrington
30 comments »
Apple isn’t just sitting on the sidelines as startups like iLike and MOG and others try to tackle the social music space. Many of these services gather user music preferences via an iTunes plugin. You are then able to tell the world what music you are listening to, get recommendations for new music you might like, etc. People love this stuff, as evidenced by iLike’s ridiculous growth and Last.fm’s $280 million acquisition by CBS.
Apple has launched My ITunes, a set of widgets that may be a first step in taking their fair share of the social music market. Niall Kennedy caught sight of it a couple of days ago.
iTunes is giving you an effortless way to keep your friends up-to-date with your favorite music, TV shows, movies, and more. My iTunes widgets are simple, self-updating add-ons for your web page, social-networking profile, or blog.
Use My iTunes to share your top reviews, favorite artists, and new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store with anyone who visits your site.
There are currently three embeddable widgets to choose from. One shows recent iTunes purchases. Another shows music you’ve reviewed on iTunes. The last shows a sort of tag cloud of artists you’ve purchased on the iTunes store. The widgets can be customized by size and color.
The first and last widgets only work if you’ve actually bought stuff on iTunes. I’ve bought enough things to create a thinly populated widget below. But what would be far more interesting is a widget that, like iLike, shows your favorite music and plays at least a 30 second snippet of each song.
Jobs couldn’t have given a bigger hint than what he said in all things digital. We were all expecting to see a competitive product set.
>> caught site of it a couple of days ago
should be
>> caught sight of it a couple of days ago
delete this comment.
The main issue iTunes will have to face is that only a tiny minory of users have a tiny minority of content on their iPods for which they paid. We polled several dozen people on this issue - two (about 5%) of iPod users reported that they bought some of their music, of these one said it was around $20 worth of and the other one said it was “a few songs”.
But the move is so right and so long overdue - Apple has just scored pretty high in a lot of books! I think they’ll soon see what’s working and which features of the new iTunes will really start “bringing it home”.
Great news.
I’m holding out for the very simple, but practical “most played” and “recently played” widgets.
bla…I expect more from Apple
Igor - Yes but that tiny minority is probably larger than the current number of people visiting iLike…
Widgetbox has the iTunes widget too:
http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/my-itunes
And you can see other user’s “mixes:
http://www.widgetbox.com/tag/mixits/
Cool!
Buxr - haha, very true, many-many times larger, and very right move on Apple part, I think next they will experiment with new business models since the 99 cents per song is clearly not working as well as 99% of anything one can read states - and that’s even in America. And outside of the US - it’s the good old Wild West….
Widget is a bit lame.
Looks like Widgetbox has an integration deal with iTunes with this. Check it out: http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/my-itunes
They seem to make it easy to change the style of the widget after the fact and add it to many popular blogs and social networks.
Robert, Widgetbox also seems to have a widget you create from your playlist as iMixes. They call them MixIts. This way you can make a Smart Playlist in iTunes for Recently Played, make it into an iMix, and then turn it into a MixIt on Widgetbox. Sure, kinda roundabout, but at least there’s a way.
I think last.fm has a big lead on these widgets though.
About time to. I’m not sure what took iTunes/Apple so long.
Completely lame. No competition for iLike or the others.
Like everything else Apple does, it comes with an annoying factor. I have an apple id and an apple account (for which they charge me once year) but cannot log into it cuz im not based in a country where they have an itunes store. Long way to catch up with ilike, MOG or Last.fm..cuz this is just an extension of thier itunes store…
being an apple fan is so not easy these days..:(
Interesting move on Apple’s part, especially given that they failed to produce versions of these widgets for their own widget platform.
As with any web widget however, you can use our Amnesty Generator to get these web widgets on your desktop outside of the browser by converting Apple’s web widget code into a Dashboard widget (or a Sidebar Gadget if you use Vista):
http://www.amnestywidgets.com/Generator.html
I am a fan of Apple. I hope this time the “bull” last.
I give the credit to the small guys making applications at Facebook and other parts as well. It is tough to compete with the financial muscle of these corporations, although the people of Google says that they are more afraid of developers in a garage that big corp.
Mario Ruiz
http://www.oursheet.com
They should have a widget for Facebook also, so Apple iTunes will get accessed more directly
Apple’s entry into the Social Music Space mirrors exactly what the folks over on Compete.com mentioned as the key trend they are seeeing in terms of web traffic lately.
http://blog.compete.com/2007/0.....sic-sites/
It seems now that in a stretch of 12 months or so it has become a key requirement for every business with web facing business model to adopt some sort of social component in their business model to compete.
iTunes for linux now!
I’ll stick with Last.fm. Silly how it will only include purchased items (unless you review them). The widget is worthless unless you have purchased a certain critical mass of music directly from iTunes (or reviewed a large number of titles). Still, I’d much rather show my top bands (80% of which was stuff I owned before starting to use itunes).
It seems like they’d widen the widget’s content scope to include a user’s entire iTunes library. Where I’ve bought the music in my iTunes library should be irrelevant — in the end, the widget is just free advertising for iTunes.
been using last.fm for a while, but if i can use these widgets and not have to run the last.fm in the background. i’ll switch for sure.
anywhere.fm (which I first learned about here on techcrunch) is kick ass. You can upload your songs from itunes, make shareable playlists on the site, and listen to your friends’ music as well. It seems like it’s catching on really fast because people are uploading their entire libraries and sharing them. The songs can only be streamed, not downloaded, so I think it’s legal…I’m not an RIAAlawyer though.
This widget is pretty lame. I’ll stick with Last.fm!
if the sample my iTunes thingy is a snapshot of what 2.0 people are listening to - where’s the skip button?
Somebody should inform Apple their widget’s “Make your own” popup is being BLOCKED by web browsers.
Interesting, I just opened my music site.
Hey guys,
I made a quick and dirty Facebook app to allow people to paste their Widget code into a spot and have the widget appear on their profile.
Check it out here: http://udayton.facebook.com/ap.....a5317397a5
Matt