Michael Tsai has a great roundup of views of Apple’s Music Connect service. That’s the tab that puts you in contact with various bands. He didn’t quote it, but apparently the posting process is rather clunky. I tend to agree with those who find this underwhelming. I don’t think I agree it’s Ping level bad though. Further there are many ways Apple could salvage the service.

First the uploading needs to be far, far better. If you want good content you need to make creating the content at least as easy as posting to a blog. I’m rather surprised Apple would launch a billion dollar service and then have such a poor portal for a key component. That’s the sort of thing you can get away with developers on¹ but can’t really for more creative and less technical types. 

Second Apple really should make it open for music curators who often aren’t the same as the bands. This is a very weird omission given that Apple’s put so much emphasis on curating. You’d think there would be people who you’d learn have pretty good taste in music and want to see their suggestions. Music seems oriented around this but is limited in various ways. The lack of curator Connect people is one. Better seamless playlist sharing is an other.²

Better social media integration would be nice too, although perhaps Apple was burnt on that point. If you recall the Ping service rested on thorough integration with Facebook. However Facebook pulled permission at the last second likely dooming Ping. I can see Apple not wanting to tie the service to questionable support from Facebook or Twitter. Still it would be a nice feature to see playlists by people in my stream. If Apple doesn’t use Twitter or Facebook you’d think they could use Game Center to do the same thing. Or even just type in someone’s Apple ID or email and have that stored in iCloud for lookup. There are lots of ways Apple could make this easy.

Finally the whole list of who one follows in Connect is pretty annoying. There’s no easy way to trim the list. You can either follow everyone you have a song from or have to add them (or remove them) individually. With most people having thousands of tracks that’s not exactly a good situation. You’d think at minimum Apple would offer to only auto-follow the top played bands. No such luck.

I think there’s plenty of time to add features though. To me in its current form Connect is pretty useless. But there is a lot of potential there if Apple is nimble enough to make use of it.