I love iTunes because it's easily the best media player on the Mac when combined with QuickTime and iTunes is always running on my iMac because it is simple, has create playlist abilities and is super smooth. I'm also a massive fan of how music players incorporate social features, these music players are not mainstream enough like iTunes is and iTunes has the infrastructure for these features to easily be incorporated.

In this blog post I talk about what iTunes is missing in terms of social features, these are only ideas and one can only hope that these features would be implemented in the near future, it would clearly make sense for these features to be incorporated because they would boost revenue via the iTunes store and boost iTunes' user-base massively.

Friends

It goes without saying that anything social needs the ability for people to connect and stay connected, this is typically done with a "Friends" feature, this is how Last.fm do it, Facebook and pretty much any other application with social features. I think it's safe to say that any social application that doesn't have a friends feature can only fail.

MiTunes (MyTunes)

I think that MiTunes would be a brilliant name for the feature set but in this instance i'm referring to MiTunes as the online profile for every single one of its users. Every user who has an account with iTunes and has MiTunes enabled would be assigned their own profile, this profile would contain information about them, what music they like, what music they own and of course a list of their friends, it would be the typical profile features tailored to music.

John Slater's Top 10 - A profile box containing a list of the specific user's top music, including a link to the iTunes music store for the user to preview or buy.

John Slater's Library - A profile page dedicated to a list of the entire music library of the specific user. Only displaying songs they wish to share, the privacy settings could be changed in the iTunes application. After all sometimes you don't want people to see your massive collection of Take That and Girls Aloud album. I know i don't.

Trends

I would love a way to see what is popular at a given time by not only everyone in the world, but my friends and fans of my genre. Like Twitter trends a list of the most popular artist, song or album at a specific moment would be great, it would point me to new music and would most likely push me into buying a song.

An awesome addition to the Trends feature would be a Trends Radio Station, iTunes already has lots of radio stations but all either play songs from a specific genre or crap from the 1980's (the bad 80s stuff), A trends radio would allow me to listen to all the latest and greatest music in full before i part with my hard earned money, hell it could even be supported by advertising for all i care.

Public Timeline

Like the Twitter Public Timeline the iTunes public timeline would be a timeline of what is being played by everyone in the world at a specific time and would update constantly to show everything being played. Furthermore i would love to be able to easily filter down the timeline to only show friends, genre or geographical location allowing me to get a better idea of what is popular with people like me.

Playlist Collaboration

Opening up some of my Playlists to be made not only public but open to contribution would be a great ability, especially when you have a massive library of music and you're creating playlists of a specific type of music. This feature would allow your MiTunes friends to contribute to your playlist by recommending songs that are missing, these recommendations would appear in the playlist in grey and would need approval before they would be playable, if you didn't own the song then you could click the link to go and buy it from iTunes.

Shared Playlists

This would be very similar to Simplify Media in the sense that your music can be shared amongst friends over the internet but not downloaded by them. Sharing a playlist with a specific friend would send them a notification which would be viewable in your iTunes, when accepted you can stream the playlist live from your friends computer if they are online, if not then any music you own from the playlist will be played without a problem, but other tracks would need to be purchased.

Unlike Simplify Media, which shares all of your music, MiTunes Shared Playlists would only share a small number of songs from a playlist you have setup.

Loan Music

When i own a song i expect to be able to let other people hear it, and i do when they within hearing range, but when you have friends who live two towns over or even 3,000 miles around the world this is very hard without breaking the laws. If i could send someone a track via iTunes which would show up in their library for them to listen to that would be great, this song could then be played 5 times and after the listen limit is reached it would disappear from the library and the user can purchase the music if they wish.

One major problem with this is i can see people all around the world just sharing their music all day to anyone and everyone, one great solution to this would be to only allow 30 songs at a time to be on loan, when this limit has been reached you cannot loan any more songs until the others have expired or you terminate the lending which would remove the song from their library.

Music Playback

At the moment when you play music back in iTunes the music simply plays, like you would expect, however i would love to see some social information being outputted while a song is playing. This information could show in an expanded section below the song including friend ratings, reviews, playlists its included in, play count, skip count etc etc, This information would help me understand which of my friends had the song and would allow me to recommend songs appropriately.

With all of the features i have mentioned above iTunes would become more than just a music player, it would become a way to communicate the type of music i like, find people who like this music and also share music with people who would normally never consider it allow them to expand their music collection and spread the love of music across the internet, all while keeping it legal and filling Apple's pocket with nice dollar.

Keywords: itunes, apple, music, social, social networking, free music, sharing, collaboration, playlists