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Ping Updates: 'Ping Sidebar' Coming Soon? Record Labels Miffed at Secrecy

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Aside from the occasional discussion of the Apple-Facebook negotiations prior to the launch of Apple's social networking service for music earlier this month, things have been fairly quiet when it comes to Ping. A change to Apple's iTunes Store terms and conditions today hints, however, that some changes may be afoot.

The new terms and conditions, which customers must agree to before proceeding with new purchases or downloads, mention a feature called "Ping Sidebar" that appears to be related to the serving of recommendations based on a user's activity in their iTunes library. According to the summary of the changes to the terms:
We have changed the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions to provide you with notice that if you have opted in to the Ping social network and use the new Ping Sidebar, iTunes will send information to Apple about the content you select in your iTunes library in order to provide you with Ping personal recommendations. If you do not want iTunes to send this information to Apple, you may hide the Ping Sidebar or opt out of Ping.
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The actual changes to the terms include mention of "other users you may want to follow, concerts and related information, or other Products you may want to purchase" as examples of Ping personal recommendations that could be generated from this information sent back to Apple.

While Apple has offered suggestions of artists and other users for Ping users to follow, the "Ping Sidebar" appears to be a new feature offering additional types of recommendations based directly on your own iTunes library, similar in some ways to how the Genius Sidebar in iTunes can offer recommendations for music purchases. The Ping Sidebar has apparently yet to make its appearance in iTunes, however, so the full extent of its capabilities is not yet known.

On another Ping-related note, Fast Company earlier this week reported on the early reaction to Ping on the part of the music industry. According to the report's sources, music labels are miffed that they were not consulted prior to Apple's launching of the service, as the company went straight to the management of selected artists to secure their involvement at launch.
According to several music industry insiders, Ping has so far been a disappointment. "It's not a game changer," said one source, who described reaction to the iTunes' network as indifferent. A reason for this lack of enthusiasm is due to Apple keeping record labels out of the loop. Another music industry source said labels were not briefed on Ping until the day of or day after the service's launch.

"In keeping with their general practice of keeping things really, really tight, [Apple] didn't tell anyone about Ping," the source explains. "I'd say that you had a few annoyed people."
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The report points to a music distributor who has reported that Apple is still manually adding artist pages to Ping one-by-one, a process that is slowing expansion of the service.

Article Link: Ping Updates: 'Ping Sidebar' Coming Soon? Record Labels Miffed at Secrecy
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/24/ping-updates-ping-sidebar-coming-soon-record-labels-miffed-at-secrecy/
Ping still sucks

lately i've noticed you can't search for artists anymore, just go to featured and go through the list of 50 or so. even though it says all the artists are on ping.

good thing there is twitter for following artists
 
Yet making bloated slow software even MORE bloated and slower. Damn Apple. Make iTunes 10 in Cocoa, 64bit, and speed the ****** app up.... make a better Windows version while your at it.!
 
Ping still doesn't interest me at all.

silly, and silly that music execs are upset...do they get upset when the musicians tweet or go to facebook/myspace/bookface/any-other-social-network crap out there??
 
I can assure you that keeping the record labels out of the loop is NOT a reason for the lack of enthusiasm

"A reason for this lack of enthusiasm is due to Apple keeping record labels out of the loop."
 
wait a minute...

"hide the ping sidebar"?? options to make Ping disappear? Yabba dabba doo!
 
I'm not really into following people, artists or users. I don't want to have another social network, Facebook is enough for me, and people keep posting stuff about music there, so it's not like we need a separate network just for music. Also, Ping only shows stuff that I bought on iTunes, and nothing that I already had in my music library and that I got from CDs and other downloads.
 
The Ping Sidebar is something they should have had from launch, in order to utilize a user's existing library of songs for recommendations. The service was so lame at start, that a lot of people have already written it off. This may be too little, too late.

The Ping service was also something that did NOT need to be a "secret" from Apple. I know they're used to keeping everything a secret, but for Ping...how did it benefit them? It would have been better for them to talk about introducing this feature soon, and get all the labels/bands signed up before launch.

Lots of stupid mistakes, for what could POTENTIALLY be a great service...
 
First it was the spam on Ping that made the news, then when spam was mostly eliminated (I haven't seen spam for a few weeks) it was that not enough artists were on it, but every couple of days a few more join (or pass the Apple test who knows) so every weekend we're going to have to listen to pundits announcing that Ping is a failure?

How is exactly Ping failing? It isn't supposed to change anything important, just offers a centralized way to get informations on artists you like, and it does that well.

It's pretty cool to have a simple way to follow some artists and some of the things published there I would never have looked for on the web (hate myspace type site with a passion), again nothing revolutionary, most artist use it as a marketing tool others (or the people in charge of Ping content for the paranoids) are quite active adding their preferred artist etc.

Again, it's a very simple tools with a couple of bugs around, but usable.
 
Good for apple to go around the label middleman. In this day and age they are a waste for the most part.

Some day they will be completely out of the picture.

Wait until some of the big artists start releasing their own content digitally without any labels at all.
 
I've quite liked Ping, found a few songs that I'd never have bought otherwise. I'd like a stand alone iPhone app for it, with more functionality. Having to access it via the iTunes store is a pain and I forget it's there.
 
entropys said:
Oh, dear. The parasites are miffed that Apple talked to the musicians direct and didn'tgive them a cut of Apple's efforts. Boo Hoo.
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The labels charge bands each time they go to the bathroom. They want to find a way to charge when they think about going to the bathroom.

phillydogg28 said:
does anyone use ping?
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It is an easy way to find the IP of a website. It also is a good way to check a connection between two computers. Just remember to keep ICMP running.
 
I was completely indifferent with regards to Ping, but now there is finally something I like about it..... It annoyed Music Label Executives. Hooray for Ping!
 
Mike Oxard said:
found a few songs that I'd never have bought otherwise
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I can say the same about the Genius sidebar. But I haven't bothered with Ping because many of the bands I really like aren't active anymore (Led Zep, Pink Floyd, etc) or they're active but don't have a Ping link on their iTunes profile. Maybe it will turn into something useful someday, who knows but for now it seems unnecessary.
 
I am ho-ping that this means the next iTunes update will let us get rid of the Ping icon from the UI altogether...

Good luck to anyone who wants to use it. Same with the Genius stuff. I'm not interested, so I want to be able to make it go away. Apple is generally anti-clutter, but I guess they're anti-options too, must be a right head scratcher for them. I suppose the Ping icon being there now is to promote its use. If that's for one version of iTunes I can live with it, but if it doesn't go away eventually it'd kind of suck, just a little bit.
 
burning

Anyone talking about the lack of burning out of iTunes? Seems like that's more important than the logo.

alent1234 said:
Ping still sucks
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It's not even a month old.

Mike Oxard said:
I've quite liked Ping, found a few songs that I'd never have bought otherwise. I'd like a stand alone iPhone app for it, with more functionality. Having to access it via the iTunes store is a pain and I forget it's there.
Click to expand...

Word. I didn't know Beck covered Leopard-skin Pill-box hat. Badda$$
 
powers74 said:
Anyone talking about the lack of burning out of iTunes? Seems like that's more important than the logo.



It's not even a month old.



Word. I didn't know Beck covered Leopard-skin Pill-box hat. Badda$$
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Burning is still in iTunes, they just took away the button on the bottom....File>Burn Playlist to Disc
 
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