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Apple will reportedly kill off its languishing social network for music, Ping. All Things D's John Paczkowski, whose prior Apple leaks have proven accurate, says Apple will pull the plug in the next major release of iTunes, expected this fall.
After nearly two years, Ping has attracted a fan base that Apple CEO Tim Cook recently described as "not a huge number.... The customer voted and said, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into." That makes Ping an embarrassment for a company that is the unquestioned leader in selling smartphones, tablets, and songs. Shutting down Ping would put the failure behind Apple, but would also be a public acknowledgement that Apple is out of its element when it comes to bringing people together in social networks.
That could change. If it learns the right lessons from the Ping defeat, Apple could yet go on to launch useful, innovative social products — a hit, even. The company greatly improved its odds of future success by repairing its ties with Facebook in time for the launch of iOS 6 earlier this week. Building bridges, however tenuous, has served Apple well in the past. It was once a fish out of water in retail but became an admired merchant thanks partly to its ties with The Gap (CEO Steve Jobs served on the retailer's board). It was an outsider in Hollywood, but became the leading online media seller thanks partly to its ties with Pixar (again through Jobs), which helped it convince media moguls to sign on to the original iTunes Music Store.
Apple is a fearsome competitor, so the dominant players in social networking aren't exactly lining up to give the company advice. But some of the lessons of Ping are obvious. Here's how Apple doomed what could have been a winner:
It didn't integrate with Facebook. When you join Rdio or Spotify, two leading music networks, you can link your Facebook account and quickly see which friends have already joined the network and what they're up to. On Ping, you had to join Apple's own network, walled off from the rest of the world. Adding friends piecemeal, as Macworld said, "required too much effort." The upshot: Loads of interest in Rdio and somewhere north of 10 million users for Spotify, including 3 million paying customers. Ping, in contrast, was last clocked at 1 million users, shortly after launch. Even CEO Cook now seems to realize that trying to go it alone was a mistake. "Apple doesn’t have to own a social network," he recently said. Apple eventually hooked Twitter into Ping, but it wasn't enough — everyone's real friends seem to be on Facebook.
It didn't give enough away for free. Apple actually brags that Ping offers 30-second streams to sample music your friends like. That's stingy for a network expressly billed as a way "to discover the music [friends and artists] are talking about," particularly when Rdio and Spotify give free streams of the entirety of millions of songs. Even without social features, Pandora has accumulated 125 million users with its free streams. Rdio, Spotify, and Pandora have all learned to generate revenue through account upgrades and/or advertising. Whether that business model is sustainable, it seems clear Ping would have benefited from more flexibility.
It didn't share enough. Ping's whole advantage was that it was built into the software (iTunes) and devices (iPhones) with which a great many people already listen to music. And yet Ping didn't even give you the option of broadcasting what you were listening to. You could share iTunes Store purchases and "likes," but not listens. "I'd thought [that] was the entire point" of Ping, BuzzFeed's Scott Lamb wrote at launch.
It assumed you bought everything from Apple. iTunes can manage music acquired from any source, but Ping could only facilitate sharing and discussion around tracks that exist in the iTunes Music Store. That's a pretty big catalog, granted, but esoteric music is exactly the sort of content people sign onto a social music network to discover, and it's exactly the sort of content the network's most valuable members will want to share.
__It was late to market. __As our own Steven Levy wrote in Wired magazine after Ping's launch, "In the past, Apple has won big by solving problems before its competitors. Here it’s struggling with problems other players have already cracked." In short, Ping was the manifestation of some of contemporary Apple's worst impulses: Refusing to partner or integrate with other technology companies, even when it would be a clear win for users; forcing new products to integrate heavily with Apple's existing stack of businesses, even when the products might benefit from growing in other directions; and just generally trying to own and monetize too much of the customer experience, rather than embracing the sort of vibrant diversity that makes for a great platform. The company's humble surrender and contrition around Ping, however, signals that better social products may yet be possible, and given this is Apple we are talking about, probably a very good bet.
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