Dedicated buttons for expressing your pleasure with the current song, or lack thereof
Music is so easy to come by these days. We should be in sonic bliss, right? But we aren’t, because so much of what we have on our music players is, well, crap. Our shuffled music is a mix of stuff we love and stuff we don’t. Not so pleasant.
Our goal is not just to get piles of music, it’s to have piles of music that we love. We want our music collection to have a high signal-to-noise ratio.
The iPod has a clever function to let you rank a song you hear. If a bad song comes on, you can rank it as one star and delete it from you collection when you get back to your computer.
The trouble is, it’s way too much trouble to do this. On a typical iPods it’s a multistep, multi-sensory operation: 1. Unlock the buttons 2. press the select button repeatedly while watching the device until you are in the rating mode (not the volume mode, not the progress bar mode, not the album cover mode) 3. turn the clickwheel while watching the screen to get the right number of stars 4. Click select to confirm 5. re-lock your buttons. Then, later, you need to do the cleanup chore: return to iTunes, search for your one-star songs and destroy them.
Not only is this a lot of work, it’s also completely non-viable if you are driving, running, or doing anything else that occupies your eyes or attention. The net result is you don’t. You must endure the bad music until the next time you are able to take a few hours out to hone your music collection, which is to say, forever.
Here’s the design to steal for a modern music device: real, tactile, mode-less Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down buttons on the surface of the music player. (Not the typical Apple non-button button.) (Thank you Pandora for the thumbs up/down inspiration). Pressing the thumbs affects the song’s star rating, and thus their likelihood of it being selected by the elven DJ within the machine.
Here’s the fun part: Pressing and holding the Thumbs-down button banishes the song from your ears permanently (after a second confirmation press). No further interaction needed. You can do it while running or driving or conversing. It’s gone from your portable player and after syncing, it’s gone from your desktop.
This gets even more interesting with subscription music services fed to portable music players, which let you listen to as much as you want as long as you keep paying. The system feeds you songs you might like. You gong the songs you hate by pressing and holding the thumbs-down button. The next song begins right away. The banished song is kept on a do-not-play list forevermore.
Music subscription services sometimes let you capture and keep songs you like. With this design you would do the opposite: press and hold the Thumbs Up button to keep the song locally for access anytime.
Thumbs Up/Down buttons should also appear on your home audio remote control, for the same reasons.
There are a couple of other bonus ideas to steal. Now that rating information is facilitated, the information can be shared:
- with artists and advertisers, so they know whom to reward for appreciated songs
- with your friends, so you can see who likes what (if you are into that sort of thing)
- with the whole world, to do your part in sorting through the gobs of indy music being produced. Later, those elven DJs in the machine can feed you the best indy music as rated by the collective.
Very quickly, the signal:noise ratio of your music collection would go up, increasing our enjoyment of music and minimizing the hassle of managing it. Which is nice, because life is too short to listen to bad music.
[Update 1/18/09: the Slacker G2 player, introduced 8 months after this article was published, has "Heart" and "Ban" buttons for tuning its 1-to-1 streaming audio service.]
That’s a GREAT idea! I hate when the songs I don’t care for come on and it’s such a hassle to get rid of them, if I even remember…
[Update 1/18/09: the Slacker G2 player, introduced 8 months after this article was published, has "Heart" and "Ban" buttons for tuning its 1-to-1 streaming audio service.]