If You Share A 30 Second Song Sample On My Facebook Wall, We’re No Longer Friends.
We're all well aware that Facebook lacks music functionality. Music WithMe is a music app, recently upgraded, that seeks to circumvent this situation. Trouble is that Music WithMe does a terrible job at it. If you don't use iTunes, the app is useless.
If you haven't yet downloaded the song that you desire to share, the app is useless. Most of all, why in the world would I ever want my friends – which by the way, I would have to spam to join this service – to spam my wall with 30 second previews of songs? If you're sending me a song, it had better be the whole thing.
There's a number of ways to post full songs. Since I have high expectations of my friends, I would gladly delete them if they actually lived in a world where they thought a 30 second sample would suffice. Now I have to do the work and find a whole song to hear, meaning that the app merely creates more work for me.
"[Music WithMe] is imperfect at best. For one thing, you can share only things from iTunes, which is limiting for those who prefer to manage their music with other programs. Also, your friends can listen only to 30 second previews of a track rather than the full song. Finally, you can share only music that you have in your library, so if you just happen upon a song or album that you have yet to download, you can't quickly recommend it to a friend or post it on your wall." (Read on.)
Isn’t there some thing as copy right, maybe that the 30 sec rule, and come on who’s not using a apple product these days. Plus how many times have you synced your iphone before having to leave, only to find the upload has crashed. I think this app does something yo want your iphone to do that it doesn’t yet, sync my music to my phone while im on the go. We are becoming a wireless world., and if you could sync your iphone without the USB , everyone would be doing it.
It’s a totally valid criticism that we use iTunes only right now. The issue for us was to point our development resources in the direction where they could have the most impact quickly. As Jim astutely pointed out iTunes is the 10,000 pound gorilla in the music management space right now. So, out of the gate Music WithMe for Facebook works with iTunes. But you’re right that iTunes is not the end all and be all so we’re working on integrating Amazon MP3 and other digital music vendors into future versions of the app.
As far as 30 second previews go Jim is right again: copyright issues prevent us from legally posting full songs. It’s the difference between previewing a song to see if you like it and want to buy it versus just listening to a song you don’t already own, on demand.
It sounds like you have no interest in previewing tracks so what Music WithMe for Facebook offers isn’t right for you. I’m sorry that we won’t fill your need in this area but we think for a lot of people there is value in making it easier to say “hey, I dig this song and think you might too” while providing the mechanism for sampling that song without ever leaving the Facebook environment.
You’re right that there are several ways to post full songs but they’re not always easy and they’re definitely not always clearly within copyright law. We know the tools we provide don’t fill everyone’s needs but for folks who think “easy and legal” is as important (if not moreso) than being able to freely pass around full songs we think Music WithMe for Facebook is a good option.
With that in mind, for those who aren’t philosophically opposed to song previews, we’llbe intergrating the 90 second song previews that iTunes is rolling out as soon as we can.