Ping: A handy iTunes add-on with promise

LOS ANGELES — Apple Inc.’s new music-discovery feature, Ping, is a potentially useful addition to iTunes. With it, you can see what songs your friends are buying and recommend some of your favorites to them.

It’s great that Apple is finally incorporating elements of Lala.com, which offered similar social-discovery tools until Apple bought the startup in December and shut it down a few months later. And if people use Ping to honestly discuss music, it could be valuable to me as a consumer and help music sales, too.

Ping is a good start, but I hold out hope for some improvement.

To use Ping, you must install the newly released iTunes 10. It works fine on my Windows XP laptop, but requires Mac users to have at least the Mac OS X 10.5 operating system, or Leopard, which came out in 2007. Upgrading the operating system will cost about $90. It’s not likely worth the expense just for Ping, which itself is free, as is the iTunes software.

Ping starts out by having you fill out a simple registration form.

You can have Ping automatically display the music you like based on songs you’ve already purchased. Or you can choose what to like and display, which is what I did; I put up such artists as Lily Allen, Owl City, Cowboy Junkies and Jewel.

Recommendations

After that, Ping recommended some artists and people that I might be interested in following, which would then allow me to see what they are buying, recommending and commenting on.

I found Ping’s suggestions simplistic at best, however. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, U2, Taylor Swift and Dave Matthews Band came up, as if Ping merely picked the most popular artists, not ones related to music I liked. How about some obscure artists I wouldn’t have found on my own?

I tried following a few artists that I liked, but not all were on the service yet. It will probably take a while for Ping to get populated with artists to the same degree as sites such as MySpace.

Ping got a little more interesting when I looked at the recommendations beyond the artists. Ping suggested I follow Rick Rubin, the co-president of Columbia Records; Jason Bentley, the music director at one of Los Angeles’ NPR stations, KCRW; and Alexandra Patsavas, a music supervisor who picks songs for TV shows and films.

All three people are in the Los Angeles area, and I initially thought they came to me because of the location I specified in my profile. But colleagues in New York and Seattle got the same three recommendations.

In any case, they are generally respected pickers of music, and they already had thousands of followers by the time I followed them.

Refreshingly, Rubin didn’t just pick artists signed by Columbia Records, although some of his picks were, including country singer David Allan Coe.

The “Recent Activity” section of Ping shows what people and artists that you follow are buying, liking and commenting on. It looks a lot like Facebook, so it seems familiar and is easy to use.