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Apple Falls Far from the Search Tree
March 09, 2007
About a month ago, I did a quick review of Midomi, the audio search engine that accepts singing or humming as a search query.
The results were good. I hummed a tune, and Midomi recognized it immediately. It was "Love is Blue."
So here's the thing: When Midomi picked the tune, it gave me the option of purchasing Al Martino's version for 99 cents. But what if Al Martino's version wasn't the one I wanted?
You can probably guess the next thing I did. I booted up iTunes and punched in [love is blue], which turned up 150 results - no fewer than 45 of which had the exact title I was looking for:
Listening to a few clips, it was obvious that Al Martino's version was not the one I wanted. Instead, I wanted the version from Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, and iTunes, not Midomi, promptly got my $.99.
While it's true that iTunes got my money, it had to work for it. I booted up the iTunes music store because I knew that querying any search engine for [love is blue] would not bring up any iTunes search results. And even it if had, I'd have to jump-start the ten-ton beast to buy it anyway. (Let's be honest. It has some nice features, but running iTunes simply to buy and play your music files is like using a Buick Roadmaster to get from the kitchen to the living room.)
Right now, iTunes (the data warehouse/ecommerce portion - not the front-end music player) is a little bit like AOL was in 1994 - an isolated island of content, cut off from the rest of the world with proprietary technology and firewalls. And for the good of humanity, you really want to smack people who constantly rave about how good it is.
Still, there's been a meager attempt to have the iTunes Store inventory live on the web. And I mean meager. Apple has set up a sort of web-based parallel universe to tie its iTunes database to the web. Let's say it falls short of its potential.
While you won't find it simply for [grease soundtrack], you can find these Apple URLs painfully limping along the HTTP turnpike if you filter your searches by site, such as [grease soundtrack site:apple.com]:
A couple tiny problems with that approach:
- The pages currently rest on the soft, red velour divan of the Supplemental index
- Nobody filters queries by site anyway
- The on-page widget fails at its raison d'etre - it's an iTunes detector that cannot detect iTunes:
(At least it doesn't work with Firefox. The Apple page had better luck sniffing iTunes when I ran it through IE. But that still doesn't change the fact that the iTunes library is almost totally invisible in search engines.)
Here's the bottom line. Apple engineers, if you're reading, hit "pause" on your Nano and read the rest intently:
Steve Jobs thinks only 3% of the songs on the average iPod come from iTunes. Understandably, he wants more. Joe Wikert believes that Jobs wants to increase his market share by abolishing DRM. He might be right, but come on, Steve - there's a much easier way:
Start showing up at the top when people search for [grease soundtrack]. Or [foreigner 4]. Or [green day american idiot]. Or [pink floyd meddle]. Get real and understand that DRM isn't your biggest problem. Neither is Sony, BMG, Warner, or EMI. (Maybe you've been fighting Microsoft so long you have some David/Goliath issues, but you need to get over them.) Your biggest problem - and ironically, the easiest to overcome - is Amazon.
Here's what you need to do:
- Port your entire iTunes database - songs, artists, reviews, everything - to the web with a REAL crawlable architecture. And while you're at it, publish the lyrics too.
- Get in bed with the browsers. Not your iTunes pseudo-browser evangelists. Real browsers. IE and FF.
- Get those browsers to help you build an extension, plugin, widget - whatever you want to call it - just like Flash or Quicktime. But this plugin serves as a bridge between your data store and the web. This plugin makes it possible to purchase songs from the iTunes database without requiring iTunes to run. If you're on the same machine as your music library, it will download songs also. If you're not on the same machine as your library, the song will download to that machine the next time you start iTunes on that machine. Make sure this plugin works.
- Give each track a REAL URL devoted to that track only. Give it content - not just cover art and an iTunes sniffer.
- Build that content by ensuring that every comment and review posted on iTunes gets written onto the web-based page too.
- Leverage the existing enthusiast base by getting links from sites that already rank for band names, music genres, and lyrical content. You can drive links to every song, tv show, movie, and podcast in your catalog by creating an affiliate program similar to Amazon Associates, which pays up to 10% commissions. (By the way, this will help you sell a few billion songs in the process.)
- Create and actively promote an API that lets other sites feature your 30-second music clips. (This will help you sell a few million more.)
- Have iTunes spit out indexable URLs on demand (those same URLs you created in bullet 4) so bloggers and journalists can link to them easily.
Apple's iTunes is the envy of the music database world. It has more content and more popularity than just about anyone. When Apple realizes that these two ingredients can spell total search domination, the company will have a real issue on its hands - where to keep all that money.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 9, 2007 02:38 AM
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