Apple Reveals Ping – The iTunes Social Network – Oh, And CDs Are Obsolete

By NewRockstarPhilosophy • September 1, 2010 • Digital Music, Social Media

Apple’s September Music event was held today with great fanfare and much joyful crying by Apple Fanboys.

So what did Ol’Jobsy reveal?

Well for starters, Apple sells a lot of iPods. Over 200 million sold to date, and with the introduction of the newest version of the touch screen iPods, I’m fairly certain they will sell a lot more.

Alongside that Jobs revealed that they make a lot of money with iTunes. 11 kabillion-jillion songs sold to be exact. Steve also stated that he believes this year digital sales on iTunes will out pace physical sales.

So with that in mind Apple has redesigned the iTunes logo. The compact disc is gone (shock) and replaced by just the musical notes (aww). Because Steve Jobs is a regular reader* of the New Rockstar Philosophy, he probably was inspired by my Pulitzer prize* winning article about dead media, and decided to ditch the disc. Good job Steve. I’ll start answering your texts now…

Any way, the big news for music people like you and I, is the announcement of Ping. Not BING, PING. Ping, said Jobsy, is like Facebook meets Twitter meets iTunes. A social network for music. You can follow and add friends, see recent activities from them (what songs they’ve purchased) and it even comes with a customizable top 10 chart of what you and your friends are listening to. Sounds very cool, but very Last.fm-ish.

The reason that Ping could become a big deal is that there are over 160 million iTunes users in 23 countries, and all of them now have a very quick and easy way to sign up to Ping. If they do, then Ping will become one of the biggest social media networks on the planet.

You can have public or private profiles on Ping and you can even create a “circle of friends” on Ping and have your own top 10 charts. Cool stuff. More info here. There was also new info on AppleTV and stuff but even at $99 I don’t care about that.

ALSO: Much speculation was given to the Apple iTunes CLOUD technology. It was not given the green light, and with the foresight of Major Labels I don’t think it ever will. Yet it appears that with Ping, Apple is further cementing themselves as THE place to buy digital music. Who knows maybe the iTunes Cloud is closer than we think.