Back when version 8 of Apple’s iTunes software was about to launch a couple of months back there were rumours of it featuring a new social recommendation system.  At the time, my imagination was filled with ideas of users swapping recommendations, the ability to listen to streaming music from other people’s collections and the sharing of music charts that show what you’ve been listening to.  In short, I imagined iTunes becoming a lot more like Last.fm.

As it turned out, the recommendation system was the anonymised Genius system.  Genius uses users listening histories to help create better automatically generated playlists and allows Apple to give better buying recommendations.  While Genius is a nice feature it’s a long way from the social potential iTunes has. Is there much chance of that potential being released though?  What’s in it for Apple?

Well, for a start, if iTunes became a social network people would spend a lot more time there.  I can spend hours browsing Last.fm, listening to music and exploring people’s collections.  iTunes’ fantastically easy one-click buying system would mean users could buy songs that their friends like in seconds.  It’s not hard to see why Apple would be keep on that!  While Last.fm has affiliate links for buying music, the only songs you can get with one click are those that rights holders have flagged for free download.

That’s not all; by allowing users to socialise on iTunes would give Apple a lot of useful data on the way people consume music.  From complete charts of their listening histories, to the gigs they go to and the music they recommend to others; it’d all be useful market research data for Apple.  Last.fm are sitting on a lot of valuable data that they don’t make public simply because of its value to music marketers.

So, going social would be good for Apple but would the customers go for it?  Last.fm and its rivals like Pandora and iLike are certainly popular with the dedicated music fans who have discovered them.  The mainstream profile of iTunes means many more people would find Apple’s rival service and while it wouldn’t be a hit with everyone, I think many people who aren’t currently Last.fm users who find huge value in it.

iTunes already features web-based radio stations, so why not feature streams of users-playlists and collections?  Okay, there would be licensing issues to resolve but Last.fm managed to deal with them even before they had the corporate muscle of CBS on their side, so it shouldn’t be a problem for Apple.  Just as with Last.fm, labels could manage promotion of their artists within iTunes, helping boost sales of smaller independent artists.

I’ve written before about the dream of a subscription-based ‘all you can eat’ iTunes Music Store.  There are other promising services in this area too.  If Apple combined a launch of a subscription model with more social features I think we’d be looking at the ultimate online music offering.

The thing is, if Apple did go down the subscription route they’d be less inclined to offer the social features.  Social features encourage people to buy more music. If they’ve subscribed to download an unlimited amount of music why invest money in encouraging them to download more? That would actually be counterproductive for Apple as it would increase the strain on their servers. One way the two could be combined is if the social features were used as a way to encourage people to buy into a subscription model.  “Buy our Unlimited plan and download all your friends’ music collections!” is a strong proposition.

Apple are notoriously secretive and unpredictable so we can’t really predict what their plans are for the development of iTunes are. One thing’s for sure though, they certainly have a lot of options. If they make the right choices they could create an online heaven for music fans .