Reid Dossinger

I'm one of the many people who love last.fm . I love getting a view of my listening habits over the course of years, and I love being able to see what my friends have liked and have been listening to lately. There are things about last.fm that I would like to see changed/added, but it's a great site for music sharing. And in the days when it was active, I found that the wall page on Lala to be extremely useful: seeing what friends of mine had listened to and liked. Lala and last.fm got so close to creating the perfect simple music sharing site. Why is it so hard for Google, Apple and Amazon--companies with more than enough resources to finish the job--to give us something great? What people want from a social music site: To be able to share what their music statistics are (like last.fm ) To be able to see what their friends are listening to and liking What I'd love to see is a Facebook-wall type page that can either show only the songs that your friends have liked or show...

TechCrunch (among others) has been  drooling  over Apple starting to sign licensing deals with some of the major music labels for their inevitable (and, from the looks of it, coming soon) cloud music player/storage, finally making good on their purchase of the much-missed Lala. The standard line is that, because Apple is succeeding where both Amazon and Google failed in getting the major labels, that they'll beat their competitors handily. But what that assumption misses is that success in this area will have nothing to do with major labels. It will only have to do with the quality of the product. Now, Apple has a reputation for turning our quality products, so there's no reason to believe that they won't have a better product, but the deals with the music labels will be a minor factor into the quality of the product they're able to turn out. TechCrunch keeps mentioning how the agreements with the labels means that Apple will be able to provide a product that won...