Always Already New: iMix Playlist Sharing

CMT: Did you know you can share your playlists with others by publishing them to the iTunes Store? Published playlists are called iMixes.

DSM: Yes. iMixes include 30-second previews of the tracks in your playlist that’re available from the iTunes Store. By definition, tracks by performers/composers that aren’t available in the iTunes Store can’t appear in iMixes. There aren’t a lot of classical or chamber music iMixes out there yet, but there are more than 400,000 iMixes that’ve been published to-date overall.

CMT: I know that iMixes have been around for a couple of years. But I hadn’t really bothered with them until the new features in iTunes V.7. Your comment about 6,000 string quartet tracks in the iTunes Store the other day made me think again about iMix. I spent some time playing with iTunes’ new iMix feature in iTunes V.7, which allows users to embed playlists in a blog, a MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn page, or any other web site.

DSM: When you’ve created your iMix, find it in the iTunes Music Store and click the link for “Publish to the Web.” You then get frame containing HTML code that you can paste into your blog or web page. Anyone will be able to click on any of the tracks in order to hear a 30-second sample within their iTunes software. I’ve had occasional problems getting an embedded iMix to work in this Blogspot CSS, and Apple’s iMix/iTunes Store doesn’t currently allow direct streaming from the page. But overall it’s pretty cool.

CMT: Yes, this is a viral marketing play by Apple, to pull users into the iTunes Store. But it’s not much different from the “share this song/playlist” features in Napster, Rhapsody, and other music services. So if you were imagining getting some valuable widget for free and being spared the commercial promotion, fuggettaboudit. An alternative of course is just to point your friends to your last.fm profile. That takes absolutely no effort and is commercial-free, but it’s got the disadvantage that last.fm doesn’t yet have an adequate catalog of classical music available. And it shares your entire last.fm profile, which you typically wouldn’t want to do, with all the non-chamber music things it’s probably got in it. And your last.fm profile is evolving over time, so the profile you share today won’t be what your friend who opens it next week or next month gets. It’s not a ‘publishing’ model at all. So I really prefer publishing and sharing a defined iMix playlist.

DSM: If you don’t like iTunes Store or don’t want to have Apple embedded iMix playlists force-launch iTunes, you might try HotListMaker . HotList enables playing 30-second MP3 clips, but, like iTunes, it too is commercial, steering the listener to digital music site Puretracks to buy the tracks. HotListMaker is currently in alpha, and it shows.

CMT: To publish your iMix:

• Select the playlist you’ve created on your PC that you want to publish as an iMix and choose File > Create an iMix.
  
• Enter the descriptive information about your playlist and click Publish (upload to the iTunes Store site).
  
• (Changes you make to a published iMix aren’t updated updated automatically on the iTunes Store, so if you want to change your iMix you need to republish it after you make your updates.)

If you add or remove tracks from a playlist that you’ve published as an iMix in the iTunes Store, you need to update the iMix before others can see your new list. You can also edit the description or title of an iMix, or remove an iMix from the iTunes Store.

DSM: And here’s how to change an iMix that you’ve previously published:

• To see a list of the playlists you’ve published or to remove an iMix from the iTunes Store, sign in to the iTunes Store and click View Account.
  
• Select the playlist, click the arrow to the right of the playlist, and then click Update iMix. Make your changes and click Publish.
  
• To see your iMix as it appears at the iTunes Store, click the arrow to the right of the playlist.

CMT: One main aim of playlist-sharing is for the sharee to discover new music that the sharee might not otherwise have encountered. Besides the playlist-sharing iMix stuff, there’s also the aspect of music-discovery. When looking at the iTunes website, I see that you can create a custom RSS feed to keep you apprised of new releases in your preferred genre(s). When I created one and plugged the URL into my RSS feed reader and it gives me a nice list of entries.

DSM: Well, the ‘surface’ aim isn’t the end of the matter. Publishing playlists is a cryptic way to communicate your identity, too. One of the more illuminating parts of Howard Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs, is its discussion of the ways that technologies are being coopted by people to craft their social identities. Some readers might construe the lists of items we put at the bottom of each post in this blog that way. Of course, publishing playlists is a two-way street. The sharer can be critiqued by the sharees, or he/she can be ignored. Epinions, eBay buyer and seller feedback, and Slashdot contributor ratings—and now iMix ratings—are a few examples of how we’re now able to create public identities and social capital online. But that social capital and those identities are weighed in the balance of public opinion—they can appreciate in value, or they can go down in value.

CMT: So you’re anxious about people creating and publishing iMixes merely as ‘ornaments’ for their false, wanna-be persona? Poseurs? Social fraudsters?

DSM: No, not concerned—just an incidental thought that occurred to me. I’m more concerned about what intellectual property rights attach to these things called playlists when they’re published.

CMT: And I’m wondering how the lists will be curated so that the response-time of searching to discover iMixes that match my search criteria doesn’t deteriorate over the next few years. I wonder whether Apple iTunes Store will enable ‘best-if-used-by’ expiration dates, or maybe implement some sort of most-frequently-referenced ranking or generation-based garbage-collection regime or some other way of purging old or unpopular or orphaned iMix playlists. More than that, I wish they’d add a feature that would let me specify my own effectivity ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates. I’d like to be able to put an iMix up in a sequestered pre-press ‘staging’ area, pending my having my email or blog post or other collateral materials ready. As it is, it’s instantly in the public ‘available’ status as soon as I share it. So Apple really isn’t supporting any kind of ‘publishing’ model for us. I imagine that that doesn’t matter to all of the kids sharing playlists with each other. But for a not-for-profit organization or for a university or any type of serious entity that wants to use iMixes as part of their marketing and communication with their constituencies, it’s problematic.

DSM: I’m sure Apple’s got some VLDB (very large database) engineers working on that. Of course, all that’s needed is for Google to buy them…

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