If you’ve ever stood in line for an in-store autograph session or a retail charity concert you know that you’re more likely to buy something if the band is hanging out at the store. That’s the relationship that could become the driving force behind Ping, Apple’s new music-driven social network. Integrated directly into iTunes, it’s like having a cashier on intravenous drip. Once your favorite band has made you laugh, gasp, and giggle, you kind of have to go out of your way to avoid a one-click purchase of one of their songs or music videos. If you’ve been illegitimately downloading tracks, surely there’s a pang (or ping) of guilt waiting for you. It’s only ninety-nine cents, after all, and musicians are very good at making you feel impulsive.

There are only a few bands to follow at the moment. Live for just a few days, Apple’s need for secrecy and regiment for slowly processing new content means that Ping is currently home to only a handful of selected artists including Keith Urban, Weezer, Yo-Yo Ma, and Katy Perry. Having spent years learning how to launch new bands on MySpace and drive concert awareness on Twitter, you can bet the music industry is eager to get on board and see if posting clips and behind-the-scenes pics can finally result in direct music sales.

Some artists are faster at grasping the concept than others. While 50 Cent and Death Cab For Cutie are merely content in posting mechanical updates about tours and releases, Lady GaGa delivers doll-ripping antics and Coldplay an impromptu Xylophone session. The bands who work their profiles the best will find content that makes you feel like you’re hanging out with them.

For consumers an important appeal will surely be Ping’s simplicity. User profiles consist merely of a name, photo, the town you live in, and the bands you’d like the world to know you love. Everything is removable if you wish. It cleanly avoids all the issues with privacy and confusion haunting Facebook and sets a focus on one passion – music.

You can even avoid the social aspect of the network. If you’re not a fan of sharing comments or “following” your friends, Ping can just as easily be a system to see what music your favourite bands enjoy and follow them for new concert information. You can simply turn the Follow option off.

For those who do dive in there are four activities to explore:

Like – the most common activity and yet Ping’s biggest weakness, you can click on the “Like” button for any song, album, artist, or music video in the store. This casts a popularity vote and a status update on your prolife for your followers to see, but doesn’t offer any lasting record. There’s no way to explore or get a list of all the items a person has liked, and so your vote simply becomes part of an anonymous number listed at the store. You can choose ten albums to display permanently on your profile to represent your taste, but Ping desperately needs to come up with a better system of discovery.

Post – With this feature you can add a story, a memory, or even a review to any song, album, artist, or music video. This is the feature that adds the most depth and I expect that the best users to follow will be the ones who post often. It’s nice to have someone point out an undiscovered gem, but it’s better if they tell you why they like it.

Follow – You can choose to follow any person or artist and each of their updates will be collected and presented for you as a waterfall-like feed to access from your computer, iPod Touch, or even iPhone. While bands may end up competing over who has the most followers, for users it’s merely a way to assemble content you can skim through during breaks and downtime.

Comment – Here’s the back-and-forth of Ping. Comment is the option you can use to respond to anyone else’s Like or Post. When someone shares their love for music, this is how you can give that love back. Or call them crazy, or start a fight, and many people do.

All social networks tend to be dry and empty when they first launch. Features are kept few in order to keep the demand from traffic low and it’s always the users themselves that tend to breathe in life as they arrive, but with Ping there’s a greater absence of passion at work. When Apple spoke to me about it, they described it more as a solution to a problem, a long, sought-after method to get users to explore the store the way people used to sift through record bins. For Apple Ping is about discovery first, music and social networking after that.

What I’ve discovered is that more than a third of the albums I own on CD, the ones I’m motivated to like, post, comment, and share, are still not available on iTunes and so it’s easy to feel very limited in your passions when you can’t discuss all of the music that moves you. There’s something very plain and uniform about the way profiles and artists are presented. There’s no sense of a “scene” or the personality of a genre. Ping has a great deal of potential, but it needs to break out of its prison jacket profile pages and let in a little rock n’ roll. Ping needs a little radar love and hopefully the bands themselves will show Apple the way.

You can follow me on Ping here. 

Tip: To share a link to your Ping profile, simple right-click on your name at the top of the page and select "Copy Link".