2010: The Year in Digital

17 December 2010

by Eamonn Forde

TMN's resident digital expert looks back on the tech devices and developments that shaped and shook the music landscape in 2010.

Hats off to Apple for creating both the very best (iPad) and the very worst (Ping) digital products of the year.

The iPad, even by Apple’s own achievements, was truly staggering and, as the app development community really get their heads around it, we will feel its repercussions for years to come as a whole new way to consume content.

Meanwhile, Ping, Apple's 'music-centric social network' within iTunes, was so poor, so pointless and so uninviting that even tumbleweed refuses to roll through it. It started badly (Facebook cut off integration at the last minute) and thereafter just floundered, coming across like someone trying to make a magnet pick up a bag of hair.

The irony here is that this is the kind of thing that Apple fanboys would have thought could only have been built by Microsoft on a really poor off-day. 
 Outside of Apple’s huge gravitational pull, the two big themes this year were apps and APIs.

Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry and Symbian all gave Apple’s iOS 4 and App Store a proper run for their money in a way that iTunes has never experienced. Bars raised, envelopes pushed, gauntlets thrown down, 2011 is going to be a hugely exhilarating year for music apps.

As we’ve noted, Ping’s biggest problem was to lose out on Facebook integration, but other sites and services saw connecting to third parties via their APIs as a future in which seamlessness and hybridism create whole new ways of engaging and being engaged. The new-look Myspace did so with Facebook, as did Spotify (in Europe) and Ticketmaster in the US, and this is a trend that will carry through the coming years. And hopefully not with just Facebook as the epicenter.

Apple’s walled garden approach (one that did it so much good for the past decade) now makes it look achingly anachronistic – a hermit in an age of inclusiveness. But it can comfort itself with the fact it did manage to get The Beatles’ music for download, so don’t let it be said Apple is shackled to the past. Wait a minute… that’s not right…

Finally, in a year where so many countries implemented or moved towards ‘three strikes’ anti-piracy legislation (UK, France, Ireland, New Zealand), and in which LimeWire was shuttered and both Joel Tenenbaum and Jammie Thomas-Rasset faced million dollar fines, the introduction of subsidised download cards (Carte Musique) by the French Government was a proactively positive move. This really is the best way forward post-P2P.

So let’s hope in 2011 there are more hands being held than there are being chopped off.