Apple event: iTunes 8 is no Web Genius

It's turns out that Apple is adding a pile of new features to iTunes 8, which will be available today - according to Steve Jobs at the Let's Rock event. Strangely, it pulls ideas from the Web and puts them into a client app. Here's how it works.

The Genius sidebar can find your most-listened-to songs out of iTunes and find other songs that match the style of your favorite music. So, let's say you are listening to Deerhoof. You can quickly find out that Lykke Li is somewhat similar to Deerhoof based on several key factors: light folk accoutrements, female vocals, sort of weird. Or, if you really like Deerhunter for some reason, you can find a bunch of other really crazy indie bands, like Menomena. It's almost exactly like Pandora, right? Minus the Web interface?

Oddly, Apple is getting the Web all backwards. It turns out that iTunes 8 can send your musical tastes to "the cloud" (they didn't explain what that means, I assume it is some Apple server somewhere) and then analyze the tastes of people who like similar artists and give you more recommendations. But there's no actual Web interface, so that makes it difficult to control. Say I want to tweak my Genius recommendations by removing a few people who like John Mayer (you know who you are). I can't do this on the Web, and I'm not even sure I can do it in iTunes. The Genius is not so smart, apparently.

As far as I can tell, and I'll test this later today, there's apparently no way to control how Apple mixes and matches personal musical tastes at all. Your track names, play counts, rating, and playlists are magically uploaded to the cloud which then returns music recommendations.

I thought social networking was not anonymous? I thought the whole idea of connecting with people about musical tastes was so you can "friend" them and find out what else they are into?

I'll have a report later today on whether the Genius in the Cloud actually works, after iTunes 8 is released.

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