iTunes Ping
Social media meets music library. That was Ping, the failure of an experiment baked into iTunes 10. Released in 2010, Ping seemed to be an immediate success, with Apple claiming 1 million users within the first 48 hours. The goal of this feature was to bridge the divide between artists and listeners, giving everyday users a way to interact with their favorite musicians and share music with friends. Ping had all the ingredients of a regular social media network: a news feed, followers, and multimedia content. Heck, when Steve Jobs revealed the platform, he succinctly described it as “sort of like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.”
I can speculate about all the reasons Ping failed, but the bottom line is that it just didn’t catch on with users. Ping was limited in scope, it launched without Facebook integration, and it didn’t provide anything different from the other social media networks besides a focus on music. Ping was shut down two years after it launched, with Jobs bluntly stating, “the customer voted and said ‘this isn’t something that I want to put a lot of energy into.’”
