January 17th, 2006
Create iTunes playlists with WishMix - but for your benefit or Apple's?
WishMix, a company started by former Apple developers, is a new web service that lets users create "Wishlists" of songs from the iTunes store. According to the press release, it aims to enable users to "window-shop for new music at the Apple iTunes store, and share their iTunes wishlist compilations with others".
The curious thing about this is that users can’t create a playlist of full-length songs - they can only create a "wishlist" of 30-second song samples. So it’s a "playlist" that people can share with friends & family, only the premise is that people have to pay to download the full song if they find one they like. The press release notes:
"Using WishMix, consumers can passively sample music without having to search for songs individually or to click on each one, as they currently have to do shopping at iTunes alone."
For someone like me, who uses Pandora to listen to actual playlists of full songs - free! - I can’t see the point of creating playlists of samples. I also use Webjay to find weird or interesting things to listen to. But listening to 30-second song snippets? It just doesn’t make sense to me.
I can’t get much of an idea of how I like a song just by listening to a sample of it - I need to hear the whole thing. Also passing around "wishlists" of music product isn’t really my idea of sharing. It just seems to be another way to market Apple’s music products (and before Apple fans jump all over me for saying that, I own an iPod and use iTunes).
Anyway, Wishmix is offered as a free download for Mac OS X 3.0 or newer. I’m interested to hear others thoughts on it.
