Everyone hates automatic sharing, unless there's a playlist involved.
MySpace is drumming up buzz for their upcoming redesign, and one thing's already clear: it's all about music. Playlists will be shared, songs will be recommended and, most importantly, there'll be updates on everything you're listening to, sharing automatically every time you press play. How do we know? Because Spotify pulled off the trick nearly perfectly, and, for all the jokes, surprisingly few people have been horrified to see their Spotify history show up on Facebook.
So...why not?
The backlash against print companies' social readers came almost immediately, in part because no one likes to feel like someone's reading over their shoulder. The pipeline to Facebook had a hard time capturing the nuanced reactions people have to written media. Lots of complicated and ambivalent thoughts were being collapsed down into "Russell Brandom read this." It was embarrassing. It didn't work.
Music feels different. The nuanced reactions are still there, but for the most part, they can be expressed by appreciative head-nodding. Translating that into a Facebook post isn't so hard, especially since we're so used to listening to music in public. People still feel conflicted, but it's a shallow conflict, and nobody seems to take it seriously anymore. In the long run, everybody likes everything.
