Take for instance my encounter the other day with Pandora Radio. For those not in the know, it’s a website that allows you to input music you like and using a sophisticated algorithm and musical feature tag system it will play more music that it thinks you will like. Now, anyone who’s read my stuff for a while knows I pride myself on my choice of music, and rightly so: I am awesome. I am an undisputed champion of making musical playlists, and if I deem a song, album, or band worthy of time taste, then you’d better start listening to them too because (and I say this with the utmost humility) I am the greatest music listener on the face of this otherwise tone deaf planet. I need not embellish on how good of a thing it would be to have at my fingertips an intelligent, learning system that would introduce new music I hadn’t heard of before that was on par with my previous lofty choices.
I still rock out unironically to Ace of Base; why aren’t you?!
The first thing that happens on Pandora is that you pick a single song or artist, which it will by default name the new radio station after, then you start adding music you know from there. Soon, I was tossing song after song, artist after artist onto the “99 Red Balloons Station”. I pretty much just went with a large collection of my favorite songs and waited to see what would come up. But after a few songs, it started playing music far below the quality my ears are used to. Several showtunes and Hilary Duff songs later, I realized I had to destroy this station, and start anew. This time, I would have to be smarter about my first choices, and in an effort to get less girly music out of it, I went for some good old fashioned rock.
Crocodile Rock, to be precise
Sadly, this approach also ended in showtunes.
Grumbling under my breath something along the lines of, “Hey, man, what are you trying to say about me?”, I deleted yet another station and started again. This time there was no messing around. It was only the manliest of music for me, so I bunched together as much Bruce Springstein and Dire Straits as I could, and added some Tom Waits at his gravelliest for good measure. An hour later, and it had played Sally’s Song from The Nightmare Before Christmas three times.
Now, up to this point, I can just count these grievous errors off to a couple bugs in the system and try again, but then things started getting weird. As I tried to make the best of this newest station and hope that things all turned out for the best, the ads started popping up. Apparently, again based on what kinds of music you like, it will periodically play an audio advertisement that it deems to suit your preferences. When they were just telling me about the great deals on video games and local cupcake stores, that’s fine; but there comes a point when I start to cry “Subliminal Messaging”.
Reporting the ad to be offensive to me, I tried to push this out of my mind, and soldier on through the music. Finally they played Karma Police. Singing along loudly (and badly) as I am wont to do, I soon began to notice some inconsistencies with the lyrics, though. Last time I checked, after singing “this is what you get when you mess with us” he’s supposed to echo “for a minute there I lost myself” all Thom Yorke like for a few minutes. I’m pretty certain it doesn’t start repeating the word “OBEY!” accompanied by demonic robo-laughter. Yet that’s what all the lyrics sheets I can find online say, and that’s what it did for about 25 minutes before sparks started flying out of my disk drive. I shut down the computer as fast as I possibly could.
You know, from now on, I’m just going to pick my music manually.
