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Apple's new Ping music social network shows a lot of promise. And, being based in iTunes, it has the potential to reach a huge audience of music fans.
Unfortunately, Apple launched Ping with a tiny number of artists to follow and interact with. And, even more important, Apple hasn't made it easy to create artist profiles in Ping.
This is slowly changing, though, as music distributors, like CDBaby and TuneCore have stepped in. Both services have published information for their users on setting up Ping artist profiles.
Here's how musician and blogger (Wire To The Ear) Oliver Chesler describes his experience setting up a artist profile on Ping, for his alter ego, The Horrorist:
I received an email from Apple with set up instructions. The process only took a few minutes.
I picked my preferred genres, uploaded my photo, typed a two line bio (they can be longer if you like) and picked ten songs I wanted to feature. That last part is interesting because I checked out a few other artist profiles and the hip-hop guys all chose some of their own music while most others picked a selection of music they were listening to. I went the later route to give fans a taste of my influences. All the songs have to be in iTunes and happily even the obscure music I searched for was there
To kick things off I uploaded a few photos from my recent live show and a video from my last show in Malta. The only real downer is when I went to find artists and people to follow I discovered most of the bands I like don’t have profiles yet.
Apple has also published guidelines for musicians setting up artist profiles on Ping.
The Ping: Artist Guide and Best Practices is embedded below:
If you've got other suggestions for setting up artist profiles on the new Ping social music network, leave a comment!
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James Lewin
Twitter @podcasting_news
Sega sound for now
Two new phase-based sequencing modules from 4ms
New PCM 80/81 Editing via the Electra One MIDI Controller
Still tiny and DIY but impressive though