The unbearable likeness of being…
One of the truly great things about iTunes is the way its ’sharing’ facility works. At work, this means that anyone using iTunes can miraculously see anyone else’s library (assuming they’ve got sharing turned on).
First time round, I didn’t know where this collection of ‘Michael’s Tunes’ had come from: a ghostly music library appearing on my screen from nowhere (rather like the first time my dad went on AOL: someone sent him an IM and he unplugged the computer in fright). Anyway, there’s now about half a dozen of us who, off and on, share Tunes.
The shocking thing is: we’re all pretty much exactly the same. In fact, if you eliminated everything from everyone’s music collections that someone else had - we’d all be left with hardly anything at all.
Of course, if you were a music industry marketing man, you wouldn’t be surprised: we’re all of similar demographics, we (obviously) work in the same industry and we’re all of about the same age (ok, some of us are slightly older).
But for us: who have crafted our CD collections over a couple of decades through an apparently random and (so we believed) slightly inspired combination of purchases, gifts, freebies and ‘bo rrowings’ to find that someone else has ended up with almost 80% of what you’ve got (or vice versa) is ever so slightly crushing. We thought we were such individuals, but deep down, we’re all just bits of just another cluster group on the great marketing map of the world.
Women can be crushed by going out and finding out that someone has the same dress as them. But that is just a one off event: this is much, much worse.
Given that music is such a communal thing, this is a bit of a strange grumble: I’ve just stood in a field with 60,000 people singing along to Oasis: not much individuality there. Someone else has to be buying the same CDs as me: surely it’s better it’s someone I like than someone I loathe (although, if I could check the CD collection of someone I loathe, I’d probably find a lot of similarities there as well).
And yes, the whole Amazon phenomenon of ‘people who bought this, also bought this’ is leading us on shopping sprees that feel quite random to us, but which are, by the way their constructed, bound to make us buy exactly the same stuff as everyone else.
Anyway: I have a solution for this.
First, the iTunes sharing facility should actually produce a combined colour coded library. Each person on the network is assigned a colour. All tunes owned by one or more people should be grey, but all tunes with a unique owner would be coloured with that person’s colour.
Finally, on both iTunes Music Store and Amazon we all need to upload our music collections to allow for much more precise cross-tabbing. This was you can see, for example, the most popular albums actually owned by the people who have bough the CD you’re about to buy, or you can check, say, what proportion of people who own John Martyn’s Solid Air also own, Ulrich Schnauss’s Far Away Trains.