Apple wants to increase the social interaction between musical artists and fans in its Apple Music service as evidenced in a newly granted patent (number 10,949,052). It’s dubbed “social interaction in a media streaming service.
The streaming media service would permit artists or other users to create and upload “posts” to the service. They could include text, references to content items in the catalog of the streaming media service, and/or non-catalog media content items that are created by the artist and uploaded as part of the post.
Posts could be presented to users as they browse the catalog of the streaming media service and/or in a dedicated feed. The rendering of a post on a user device could include graphical user interface controls that allow the user to access content items referenced by or included in the post.
In the patent data, Apple says that, despite advances in technology, streaming media services retain the traditional model of interactions between the artists who create media content and the users who consume it. An artist can create and publish media content items to a streaming media service (sometimes directly, but more often through a publisher).
A user of the service can browse a catalog of published media content items published by the artist and select content items from the catalog to consume (e.g., streaming, downloading, or purchasing, depending on the features of a particular streaming media service). The artist can receive information from the service about users’ patterns of consuming content.
But beyond this, there is little interaction between artists and consumers. Apple wants to change this.
