Apple to enable full song sharing in next major iTunes release

[Shawn Knight]

Rumors that surfaced earlier this month claimed Apple would be removing Ping from the next major release of iTunes, essentially chalking it up as a failed endeavor.

Now we are hearing more rumblings related to the topic, this time suggesting that Cupertino is planning to add new features to iTunes that would facilitate music sharing among friends.

Bloomberg says that people with direct knowledge of the matter have told them that Apple is negotiating new licensing deals with record labels that would allow friends to share or recommend full songs with each other, much like Spotify’s service already does.

This would be a vast improvement over Ping which only lets users share a 90-second clip of a song with friends.

Other new features include deeper Facebok and Twitter integration in iTunes which will let people share what they are listening to. Again, this sounds a lot like Spotify’s ability to stream listening information to a user’s Facebook profile.

The publication also points out that Apple will put more emphasis on iCloud with iTunes. This is already evident as the company recently released a dedicated Podcast app for iOS devices, effectively relocating the service from within iTunes.

What’s your take on these new features, specifically related to music sharing? Do you like the idea of being able to see what your friends are listening to or do you believe it will only further clutter your Facebook news stream?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/49189-apple-to-enable-full-song-sharing-in-next-major-itunes-release.html

 

[gwailo247]

With everything out there available on Youtube, I really think that both the software companies and the media companies are making way too big of a deal of all this sharing and licensing, etc.

All I need to do is post a youtube link on my FB wall, and everyone that wants to listen to the song can listen to it. At that point they can buy it, rip it off youtube, rent it, whatever. Do I need to know every song they listen to? Not really.

In my experience if someone thinks a song is really cool, they'll post a link to Youtube and say "this song is awesome". And if there are 20 of my friends who 'like' the link, then it means that they all recommend it too. I already get too much crap on my wall as it is, don't need to know every article read, web page visited or song listened to.

 

[psycros]

The only "music sharing" that 99% of users care about happens on torrent sites. I can't wait for this social networking fad to die out.

 

[TJGeezer]

"social networking fad" - good one

Actually, I can see that people might decide to get out of each other's pockets a bit - once they hit adulthood, anyway - but as for it dying out, nah. Services like The Source and CompuServe were based on the urge for social networking, long before the Internet. People gathered in interest groups to trade all sorts of information and opinions around, some of the info highly personal. Current networks just do it better, is all. The urge seems basic, like membership in a community, artificially created or not. Think: sports fans, political causes, ...

Then there are people like me, who find Twitter and Facebook about as appealing as cholera. Takes all types.

 

[SNGX1275]

I think its a good move. My roommate had some friends from out of town (on business) over a couple nights ago and we were all sitting around having a good time. Then somebody brought up some song, few minutes later we were youtubing stuff that each of us wanted to the rest of the group to hear.

A couple other times in the past I've had very similar things happen with people. I've found some really cool music that way that I would have never found on my own.

I don't necessarily need to see it on FB all the time, but you can unsubscribe from certain things friends update, so its probably not that big of a deal. When I was an undergrad if FB had been around I would have loved something like this to learn about new music from friends.