Social music plugin for the iPod

The new music player coming soon from Microsoft, the Zune, includes a very complicated wireless music sharing features that on the face of it seems like a good idea. Zune users can send song files to fellow ‘Zuners’ who then either have three days or three listens before the song expires, a typically conservative DRM approach.

There are rumours that Apple will introduce a similar system to the Zune in the next generation iPod.

What struck me about this approach is that they are solving a simple problem in an overly complicated way. Samsung approached the same problem by adding a speaker. Now music can be shared with friends, and the downside, everybody else in the vicinity.

Watching people use iPods and other MP3 players to share music with friends you often see one of those iconic white earbuds for one person and one for the other person. The obvious disadvantage of this is that you only get half the experience.

A simple solution, Apple and Microsoft could save themselves huge amounts of development time by adding a second, or maybe even a third headphone socket. That way music can be shared with a couple of friends, there’s no learning curve associated with sending songs over wireless and it’s a modest extra cost (certainly cheaper than adding a wifi chip)

In the meantime you can pick up this elegant social music plugin for any MP3 player for a few pounds.