New Music Biz 101: The New Social Network

posted in: Features

In Steve Jobs’ keynote address on September 1^st, Apple announced the newest social network for musicians. Since the launch of Ping, there has been a lot of controversy on the actual usefulness or value of the platform. We’re going to take a quick look at Ping from an artist perspective.

For those who don’t already know, Ping is a social network and recommendation system that allows users to follow artists and see short Twitter-like posts by friends and artists that they’re connected to on the network. Artist profiles aren’t as easily created as they are on MySpace, and you currently need to be approved to join.

The easiest way to get on Ping is through a company that distributes to third parties like Tunecore and Nimbit. Most of the sites that help you get your music on iTunes are now able to get your artist page up and running on Ping. When experimenting with this process, we used Nimbit to see how difficult it was to get going. We found it relatively easy to get started. It involved asking a few questions about you as an artist and Nimbit sends the information over to apple for approval. Apple then responds shortly after.

When looking at an artist profile you’re able to see an activity stream as well as upcoming concerts and a few additional links. As you can probably imagine, the artist interface includes the ability to sell your music using the iTunes store. As an artist, you’re able to upload photos, videos and text updates similarly to Facebook.

The big question of course becomes, is Ping going to be the MySpace killer? In our opinion, that is yet to be seen. Ping is very cool in theory, but has yet to show anything overly impressive. Running a social network inside of a desktop application has proven to be dangerously slow. Users really hate any site that runs slowly, and this could potentially hinder Ping’s growth. But as time goes on, the Ping user base grows. And as new updates and additions begin to be released, we’ll have a better sense of its true value.