iTunes needs a drink of the new Kool-Aid

iTunes Store offers discount albums:

"If that isn't a thinly disguised jab at the music labels, particularly one recalcitrant label that is having second thoughts about bending knee to Apple, I don't know what is. "

See, see, I told ya:

SwitchBlog: Social Currency and the iPod:

"The obvious take-away is that Apple will now start to behave more like a music company. Now it can sell culture unfettered. "

Unfortunately, I didn't find an album that I wanted on that page. It was too much work to go through them all.

If Apple wants to actually become a demand-generation machine, it's going to need to improve iTunes.

- A good start would be a way to listen to all of the previews in an album. Why hasn't this happened yet? The only way to do it is to download a script from Doug.

- Another smart move would be for Apple to drink Steve's new Kool-Aid so heavily promoted at the WWDC. I'm talking Web 2.0 and Safari as a platform; that's right, iTunes needs a web portal; one that plays much more nicely with the social networks and blogs, (not to mention SEARCH ENGINES).

Like food marketers say, "nothing beats getting the product into their mouths"; ears in this case. Radio was great for that, but now it's a spam-riddled, soul-less nightmare. LastFM.com is very much the last hope for "radio", it takes what was good about radio, playing lists of songs, and makes the social network into the DJ. Maybe Apple should buy LastFM, or at least innovate around it. There is a lot that LastFM doesn't seem to "get". MySpace thinks it gets it, and who can argue with success, but I see few lessons that Apple can take from them other than, social networks work. iTunes needs to stop being a cordoned-off country club and become a real social network on the real internet. (It should at least have a better, more integrated web portal. I don't see the iTunes software going away.)

Maybe working with the labels to do something like LastFM would be too much pain and take too much time. LastFM has the benefit of playing entire songs, but if you are shopping for albums, you don't necessarily want whole songs. Because iTunes already has deals in place to play 30-second clips, maybe that's the key: just make it so you can listen to all of the clips in an album with a single click and skip to the next song with the same (a single click and a pinch in the case of the iPhone).

Now, Apple could take the same concept as LastFM and let it's users create "Clip Lists" like radio stations on their blogs, MySpace posts, etc. You know, Web 2.0. All of the lists would link right to the purchase area on iTunes.

Another problem is that the 30-second clip on iTunes doesn't always present the song in the best light. One way to fix that would be to hire editors to pick out the best parts of songs to be in a particular clip. Another would be to crowd-source it. iTunes users could select the 30-second section of a particular song that they think best represents it. (Maybe that would require it to have been purchased on iTunes, which has the dual benefits of improving accuracy of the selection and improving sales)

None of these are particularly new ideas, but their time has very much come.