Apple’s Ping Has Exclusivity on Michael Jackson’s ‘Much Too Soon’

Reports say that another single from Michael Jackson’s posthumous record has emerged, only this time it is found in one place, and one place only - Apple’s not-very-popular, music-centric social network platform, Ping.

The new single, called “Much too Soon,” is a Ping exclusive for the week to follow, say the folks at Mashable, who’ve reached out to Epic Records for a comment on the matter. For now, the label isn’t talking.

“Much Too Soon” hasn’t exactly knocked Ping users off their chairs, going by the comments flowing in on the platform. But the response isn’t negative either.

In fact, the 56,981 Michael Jackson followers featured on Apple’s Ping don’t exactly make an accurate poll.

By comparison, the late Jackson has 24,786,370 Likes on Facebook, while 259,746 people follow him on Twitter, Mashable has found.

Also noteworthy is that both these services include links to Ping.

It is yet unclear why Jackson’s “Much too Soon” arrives as a Ping exclusive, but some (in fact, many) will speculate that it has something to do with Apple’s necessity to populate, and implicitly popularize Ping.

Ping, as avid Softpedia readers will remember, has had a rough start.

With the release of iTunes 10, Apple introduced Ping with much fanfare, touting it as a great way to follow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to, and downloading. In short, a social network for music.

Two days after the introduction of Ping, the Mac maker announced that the service had garnered over one million users, but many remained skeptical that registering with Ping just to see what it was all about did not, in fact, translate into a “user”.

Bottom line, Apple’s idea of social networking based on musical taste may not be something that the company’s faithful users were dying to see implemented in iTunes.