Monday, February 29, 2016

Apple Music Connect

Dave Wiskus:

I don’t see a follow button on iTunes artist pages. Maybe this is an Apple Music thing, and I can’t get to it because I don’t subscribe. On the Connect tab I might expect to see some kind of discovery mechanism, but no. Maybe I’m missing something.

As a fan I don’t feel “connected” to anything. I feel sad. Even a post from Weezer only got 13 comments, and they all looked like this […]

[…]

This experience is probably rare. Most artists will likely not lose all of their followers and data. But it only happened because of the cascade of design failures we encountered while attempting to do something any 1.0 service should offer. Every service in the world allows you to change your profile photo. Every service in the world shows you how many followers you have and gives you ways to contact them. These aren’t optional features, even for something brand new. Seven months later—from a company the size of Apple—this isn’t just unacceptable, it’s pathetic.

[…]

It’s also not a very good broadcast medium. Sure, I can post to Connect and share out to Twitter and whatnot, but why? There’s nothing unique or powerful about Apple’s system that makes it a good hub. Because I have no idea how many followers we have, I can’t even make a numerical argument for Connect-first posting. And since we can’t even invite people from other places to follow us on Connect, there’s no incentive to try.

Update (2016-03-01): See also: John Gruber, Nick Heer, MacRumors.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Even Ping was better than what we have. Again, most of this is due to bad UI design rather than capabilities of the system.

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