Suddenly There Was Ping
When Steve Jobs takes the stage, something happens to otherwise functional adults. Wallets open. Mouths open. Critical faculties take a brief sabbatical. There’s a keynote rhythm to it—the pacing, the practiced nonchalance, the product reveal that feels inevitable in retrospect—and it works every single time because it’s built to. The September 2010 Cupertino event delivered the usual package: phone updates, a restyled iPod, a new Apple TV. And then, tucked in at the end like it was nothing: Ping.
Ping is a social network built directly into iTunes. You follow friends and artists, watch what they’re buying and listening to, recommend tracks, leave comments. It aims squarely at Last.fm and the gutted remains of MySpace Music. The interface is clean, naturally, because Apple’s interfaces are always clean. The intent behind it is somewhat less so.
The intent is to sell music. Not to connect fans, not to surface discovery—to move units through iTunes at a moment when the music industry is watching its revenue model disintegrate. Ping is Yu-Gi-Oh! for adults: an elaborate social ritual engineered to make you feel like you’re participating in a community while the actual function is separating you from money. The genius is that Apple barely conceals it. The buy button is right there in the feed.
There’s a specific trap Ping sets that’s worth naming. If you’ve accumulated music through means Apple would prefer you not discuss publicly, and then you use Ping to display those tracks to your network, you’ve created a ledger—what you own versus what you purchased through iTunes. Those lists will not match. Anyone paying attention will notice. Ping is, among other things, an inventory system that works against its own user.
Whether anyone needs another social network is a question with an obvious answer. Whether Apple’s naked commercial intent makes Ping less appealing—yes, but that’s never stopped a product before. Apple will keep packaging its monetization in beautiful objects and white earbuds until the whole enterprise feels like liturgy. The aesthetic is the argument. The product is the prayer. Heil Steve.