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Apple’s Ping to hit the chopping block in next iTunes update

You can’t say it wasn’t a valiant effort on the part of Apple. They tried hard to push Ping on us, which was their own social music hub, but it just didn’t work out. And with the next iTunes update, Ping won’t be able to sing anymore.

With so many social music networks out, Ping barely stood a chance. I would say Ping’s biggest disadvantage was that it was a niche network, only for Apple iTunes users. It didn’t scale to the global market, and with Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Music, Myspace Music and more, the competition is fierce and Ping didn’t hold it’s own.

Suffice to say, Ping will be discontinued in the next iTunes release which should be sometime in the Fall when iOS6 is launched where Apple will be focusing heavily on their social integration with Facebook who partners with Spotify. The next logical step for Twitter will be to create some sort of official partnership to get music more integrated into the social media platform. In the past they worked with Apple using Ping, but since Ping is going away they will need to figure something else out. I think that SoundCloud is really a great platform and the most ideal fit for Twitter. Thoughts?