$0.02 on Macworld

Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller delivered the company’s final keynote at Macworld yesterday:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday it was dropping copy protection from songs sold on the Internet and debuted its slimmest 17-inch laptop yet, but with no dramatic products or master pitchman Steve Jobs, the company’s final Macworld performance disappointed Wall Street.

Guess the pressure from Amazon’s MP3 store – where many are turning as an alternative to iTunes — finally caused Jobs to cave on the variable pricing issue, which labels have long clamored for.

Tuesday’s event produced few surprises. Apple announced a $2,799 17-inch laptop that is the company’s lightest and slimmest ever, as well as tweaks to software for home movies and photographs.

We’re heading into what is possibly the biggest recession since the Great Depression and Apple rolls out a $2,800 laptop?

Good luck with that.

Music tagging

Here is a complaint I have about every music program I’ve ever used, from WinAmp and MusicMatch back in the day, through Windows Media Player and now iTunes: Why isn’t it possible to label music genres in a more taxonomic fashion? What I mean is, these program have dozens of labels for music, from bebop to surf rock.

The problem I have is that I don’t want to balkanize my music collection like that. A lot of my music falls under multiple genres. Led Zeppelin is classic rock, metal, folk and blues. Ben Harper is rock, soul, funk, blues, R&B and folk. Sometimes I want to make an automatic playlist of blues, but I want that to include bluesy songs from Zep, The Black Crowes and The White Stripes. But sometimes I might want a catch-all playlist that will capture any 5-star rock songs and don’t care if it’s blues rock, alternative, grunge, or metal. Unfortunately, the single label system used in all this software makes that impossible.

So here’s what someone needs to do: make song labeling hierarchical and give users the power to control that hierarchy. For me, I would have a very few top-level genres: rock, folk, easy listening, jazz, rap and classical. Within rock I’d have classic rock, alternative, southern rock, metal, etc. You could even go a level deeper, for example by breaking down metal into speed, death, doom, and so on.

This would allow for easier playlist generation. Under the current system, a song tagged as metal isn’t going to show up in a rock playlist. Under my system, it would, as well as allow for a separate metal playlist.

Does anyone know if this has already been done somewhere?