Is Steve Jobs gonna die?

I certainly hope not.  But all I know is his health has now overshadowed the company’s products.  And for that I blame the media.

Same deal with Sarah Palin.  She’s a cute mom from the frontier, the public must love her!  Tell me how much they love her when she and her old man get elected and institute the heinous policies they stand for and personality goes into the back seat, like with our bummer President today.

I don’t know who’s worse, the ignorant public or the out of touch, herd mentality media.  Your job in the media is TO GET THE STORY!  Not to be friends with your subjects.  Being friends, making it high school, gets in the way of getting the story. But in our social networked world everybody’s so afraid of being friendless they think of relationship first, reality second.

Like Pandora.  We’re supposed to love it because Tim Westergren is standing up to the lame labels.  He is!  The music industry is trying to extract a pound of flesh, which will kill the service.  Just another instance of how the industry hamstrings entrepreneurs.  But, if this is so, how did Apple come up with its Genius Sidebar?

If you use and enjoy Pandora you’ve got a lot more money than sense.  Meaning you pay for the service, so you can click through its lame suggestions.  Or you’re truly cheap, and listen to what they purvey.  With suggestions so lame, it’s like saying someone who likes chop suey will love sea urchins…  How do they come up with this stuff?

I’m not sure computers will ever be able to recommend what people like.  But I am interested in what others who like what I do also like.  That’s the essence of Apple’s Genius service.  And it provides a ton of results and it’s FREE!

While the media has been debating the meaning of Jobs’ skinniness, the faithful have downloaded iTunes 8.  Which delivers the Genius service.

Your library is scanned and uploaded to Apple and results come back.  Supposedly, Big Brother is not keeping this data so the RIAA can subpoena it, so you can get busted for not paying for your music, but I’m taking this on faith.  And I wanted to check the new service out.

Bottom line…  You play a song in iTunes and the Genius Sidebar (which you can turn off), shows the Top Albums it comes from, the Top Songs You’re Missing from this same act and a list of Recommendations.

It’s fascinating.  And free.

I dialed up Boston’s "Hitch A Ride".  What is usually referred to as a guilty pleasure, but is just truly great.  The recommended Boston songs were "Amanda", "Smokin’", "Let Me Take You Home Tonight", "Don’t Look Back" and "Something About You".  I’m not sure "Don’t Look Back" fits, then again, that’s the point!  Just because you love soft doesn’t mean you can’t love harder.  And vice versa.

The recommended tracks are fascinating…

"Rocky Mountain Way".  Yes, a fan of "Hitch A Ride" would like this…  And there are a bunch of Styx and REO Speedwagon tracks.  Two acts I pooh-pooh, but I must state I have a fondness for the recommended "Roll With The Changes", which came from the "Tuna Fish" album, before the band wimped out on "Hi Infidelity".  And there are a couple of Rush tracks.  All you Rush fanatics who constantly e-mail me!  Your band has not been forgotten!  I should check them out.  And even Edgar Winter’s "Frankenstein".

My most played iTunes track is Walt Wilkins’ "Wrapped".  Pandora would choke on this.  But I’ve got a long list of country acts I’ve never heard of to now check out.

But the problem is, I can’t click and listen to the complete recommended tracks.  I’d pay for that.  That’s the kind of service I want.  Music discovery I can perform instantly, instantly clicking off shit I don’t want.

But it gets better than that…  Click the Genius button in the lower right hand corner of iTunes and you get YOUR OWN GENIUS PLAYLIST!  Yup, you get an instant playlist OF YOUR OWN TRACKS!  Anywhere from 25 to 100 tracks, your choice.

What the labels don’t realize is Apple is no longer dependent upon them.  The iPhone needs no music, and neither does the iPod Touch.  To fight Apple is taking the wrong road.  Hell, if NBC can settle with the company, maybe you can too.  No higher prices, but maybe package prices.  The key is to expose people to more music, to sell more music.

Maybe Genius is another Visualizer.  A bell, a whistle that intrigues at first, but is then forgotten.  But, how are we going to discover new music in the future?  And how are we going to consume it?

These are questions that must be addressed.  It must be easy for consumers to browse, efficiently, make sense of the zillions of tracks out there.  But it must be even easier to sample said tracks, IN THEIR ENTIRETY!

iTunes 8 is not perfect.  You can’t eliminate the Buy arrow in the main window, which you could do previously.  But Apple is still innovating.  The star of Tuesday’s presentation wasn’t the latest Nano iteration, but the software, the iTunes 8 upgrade, free, with Genius.  That’s why Apple keeps winning.  It’s about the SOFTWARE STUPID!  Anybody can make a hardware device, have it constructed for cheap in China.  But creating a seamless user experience, an integration of hardware and software, that’s tough.

Criticize Jobs all you want.  Apple too.  You’re just sour grapes.  The adoption of Macs at the home level is positively staggering.  And this is purely as a result of usability.  You thought price was paramount.  But then why did Wal-Mart not win in online music?  Amazon sells everything, but its music offerings look no different from books and electronics, there’s no sexiness, no thrill.  iTunes is your village and your village alone.

This is not being a fanboy, but pointing out the direction home.  Focus on making it a better user experience.  That’s how Google won.  That’s how Apple won.  That’s how the labels lost.  By suing their consumers and still wanting them to buy the whole damn album to hear one goddamn track.  That’s like making you watch CBS from 8-11 in order to see "CSI".  Utterly ridiculous.