Independent artists are finally making their long, slow progress onto Apple’s social network for music, Ping. Ping, which launched after months of development without support from Facebook and with limited involvement of the labels, was originally castigated for offering a major label bias. This is now slowly changing, as independent aggregators including CD Baby and TuneCore step up their attempts to help their acts create Ping profiles. “CD Baby will now be submitting a limited number of artist profile requests to iTunes on a weekly basis,” CD Baby said last night. However, progress is slow, “Apple will be receiving similar requests from all the major/indie labels and aggregators they work with, so creating new artist profiles will take some time on Ping’s end since they have to set up each account and verify authenticity.” Apple has been criticised for the obsessive level of control it pushes for. CD Baby continues, “Because of this, we will not be able to procure access for the entire CD Baby catalog in one fell swoop. However, as the process becomes more streamlined, we’ll be able to send more and more requests each week.”
