"Chances are your answer to the question "what's your favorite music?" would depend on your mood, where you are, who you�re with and what you�re doing."
In that one simple marketing-puffed phrase, Apple have captured the essence of how people might want to organise music i.e. in utterly variable, complex, and ultimately highly personal ways. Seeing music organisation in a wider context of the user experience is something I've touched on before, but not really dealt with thoroughly, as I'm keen to do some user-research on this matter. But Apple's new iTunes 3, presumably on the back of their own user experience models, is already beginning to make their 'digital hub' products near-essential. Here's Apple's suggestions for potential applications of their ratings mechanism:
- Classic Rock Genre is Rock and Year is in the range of 1960 to 1979
- Never Been Listened Play Count is 0
- Absolute Favorites My Rating is five stars
- Forgotten Tunes Last Played is not in the last six months
- New York Times Song Name contains NYT and Genre is Spoken Word
- Flavors of Mozart Composer contains Mozart and Genre contains Classical
- New Releases Year is 2002
- Love Songs Song Name contains Love or Album contains Love
- 100 Newest Limit to 100 songs selected by Date Added
- Fill my iPod Limit to 4 gigabytes selected by random
By adding date (note: both recording date and date added), rating within genre, device-oriented measures such as gigabytes, track title, and composer_name vs. artist_name, they've already enabled a rich set of possibilities. My earlier post picks out a few more angles such as location, instrument/technique etc., but Apple are really forging ahead here, imho, by integrating quite powerful operations in highly accessible, consumer technology. Fascinating developments. As the NYTimes says, "Over all, the new iTunes-iPod combination makes you wish there were a Pulitzer Prize simply for good ideas." [registration required, free]
