Browsing is out, filtering and recommendation is the next phase

Gerd Leonhard at Sony states the obvious

And then there's this from Mike Gaumond, VP & GM, Motorola Media Solutions, speaking on a panel [paraphrase]: "I think a model which allows consumers to discover new music and then acquire it is the best business model. No one does it well yet: Apple's music discover function, or anyone else's, sucks."

Uh, yeah Mike.

Except that Amazon's referral, er, "discover function" is pretty damn robust, market proven, easily duplicated, and more or less used by Apple at iTMS. As in, "People who bought this track also bought these tracks." I don't have click-through statistics for either Amazon or iTMS, but I'm pretty sure that in between that and lists and lists and a host of other novel filters (hits, mixes, playlists, exclusives) that the filtering system is getting some heavy use.

Gaumond, who works for a phone hardware company, probably thinks that the key is being in a club or a bar or a schoolyard and being able to have peer-to-peer interaction that results in filtering or more real-time recommendations. In other words, you're at the bar and hear a great song on the PA, you can push a button on your Motorola phone and download it. Or, your friend at lunch casually mentions a great new track or new jingle or whatever, and you can just turn on your Motorola phone and grab it. That's a nice pipe dream, inhibited only by technology but so obviously likely to come in the next few years that it's fairly embarassing to describe Apple's current function as "sucking."