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A few months ago we updated our phones. Of course there was nothing wrong with our current phones, we were just switching carries (which could easily be the subject of a completely different rant) and cell carriers enjoy a ridiculous level of vendor lock-in here in the US. Looking at my options, I decided against anything from Samsung or most of the other brands as I'm always unhappy with the bloatware that gets forced upon you. Instead I opted for a Pixel, allowing me access to plain Jane vanilla android for the first time ever.

Now, I hate Google as much as the next guy. I've taken a bunch of steps with this beast to slow down the flood of personal data that I'm sure I will never be able to eliminate leaking from my device back to mother G. But I'm a pragmatist, and consider my phone a much lower priority than my laptop, for instance.

One thing that I absolutely hate about the Pixel, and I've been told that this is becoming common among a lot of newer phones, is the complete absence of an SD card slot. Sure, this thing has 128 gigs of internal storage. But modern software and apps eat into that way more than they should. More importantly, I have a 500+ Gigabyte collection of carefully curated music (in compressed formats - the uncompressed archive is truly enormous). Unless I set up a server to stream this from home, which I'm now considering doing, I now no longer have access to my collection when I leave home. So what's happened is that I've found out just how bad Spotify is in 2023. And yes,

First off, I'm not paying for this shit. Not when I already own most everything they could play for me that I would want to hear. So that limits me to their free tier. I can't play albums in order, play specific songs, or get away from the ridiculous ads for garbage I would absolutely never be interested in. I can add songs to my favorites list and slowly build up some curated playlists, but they can only be played in shuffle mode.

One of the more irritating things about Spotify's shuffle mode is that there is no gaurantee that they will stick to playing songs from a given album or even artist. So if I open up, say, Opeth's In Cauda Venenum hoping to hear the epic Allting Tar Slut there's no gaurantee that the song will even be played or that I won't have to endure a few tracks from Dream Theater in the process. And basically forget about even trying to listen to anything by, say, Pink Floyd, because even when two songs obviously are part of a continuous composition it's gauranteed they won't be played together.

The basic premise of a recommendation algorithm is completely flawed straight from the get go of course. How do you really categorize music? Sure, some things fall into neat little boxes, but take a guitar player like Danny Gatton. His musical influences run the gamut from Rockabilly to Western Swing to Jazz standards. Point of fact - he is all of those things at once while simultaneously being none of them at all. If I'm listening to The Allman Brothers at home, the next song very well might be Herbie Hancock's Watermelon Man or Chick Corea's Spain, because to me those things share a common thread. Certainly those artists influenced each other and helped to shape the landscape around them in the process. But Spotify looks at The Allman Brothers and only sees "Southern Rock", so you're probably in for some "Sweet Home Alabama" instead.

Similarly, if I start out with Journey, I might smoothly transition into Santana due to their common members and San Francisco roots. But you can trust me when I say that just because I enjoy "Lights" from Journey does not mean that I have any interest in Foreigner or Foghat. And if I'm feeling in the mood for the instantly recognizable Sax lines of Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" I'll likely want to follow up with something more along the lines of "Pick up the Pieces" by the Average White band than to want to hear late 70's soft rock and disco.

The thing is, categorization of music has always been stupid. Most musicians hate it to begin with and actively try to avoid being placed into the boxes that the "Indsutry" wishes to put them into. This is often to their detriment, as an artist can often be completely amazing and simultaneously impossible to promote withing the rigid structures of the "Industry" if they defy categorization. But life would be so much less interesting if you couldn't mix genres and influences. It just gets way more obvious that the people in charge don't actually know music (or likely even like it) when the recommendations are so predictable and simultaneously bad.

Somehow Spotify's recommendation algorithm manages to mimic all of the worst behaviors of corporate controlled radio. In particular, start out with anything resembling 70's rock and within a few tracks you'll notice that they're playing the exact same list of only the most popular songs that you hear on literally every classic rock radio station, anywhere. Listening to Queen? Well you're going to hear Bohemian Rhapsody at least three times as often as any other track.

As another example, out of all of the 70's Southern/Country Rock outfits I have a particular affinity for The Marshall Tucker Band. They are most remembered for the long ballad / jam of "Can't You See (What that Woman been Doing to Me)", which is about the furthest they ever strayed from a full on Country sound and is probably why the track is acceptable for your typical Classic Rock radio station. But by far my favorite track is "I Should Have Never Started Loving You" off of their "Carolina Dreams" album. If you've never heard it, this is an amazing track. It's a slow, soulful ballad dominated by a sax line just dripping with soul, and probably the finest and most emotional guitar solo that Toy Caldwell ever laid down. The vocals are equally soulful. It is, to put it simply, ten times the song of "Can't You See". It's also impossible to categorize. A slow, jazzy ballad with a deep Southern accent clearly on display alongside a full horn section with a smoking hot electric guitar solo doesn't fit into anyone's definition of any particular category and could never have made it's way into any of the Country, Soft Rock, Classic Rock, or Jazz oriented formats, no matter how good it is. And of course, putting "Carolina Dreams" on shuffle Spotify plays me every other song on the album first, every time, and also plays "Can't You See" - three times, even though that track isn't even on "Carolina Dreams", before playing "I Should Have Never Started Loving You". This despite the fact that I have favorited that track and skip "Can't You See" literally every time they play it for me.

I hate that this is the way people consume music nowadays. I am forever grateful that I grew up at a time when so may musicians were taking wild chances and integrating so many diverse sounds and styles together. My generation might have seen compact discs take off during our formative years, but the LP still ruled while I was a kid, and there was nothing more fun that getting stoned with some like minded friends and listening to old records start to finish. There's nothing better than an album that truly hits you with every track.

I've tried to keep this rant focused on the music and my dissatisfaction with Streaming as it exists today, but I have to add just how ridiculous it is to me that the Pixel forces you into this sort of usage by eliminating the SD card slot. I get it, you are expected to rent everything, forever, in today's world. The idea of having an extensive curated music collection is from a bygone era I suppose, but the fact that people aren't revolting against this system hardcore and storming the gates with pitchforks and torches is even more sad than the fact that 99% of the population won't know most of the music I mentioned in this post. I don't think that a lot of young people even realize they're being shafted, and hearing it from a guy like me is likely to just provoke an "Ok, Boomer" type response.

Streaming music sucks

2023-10-16

I refuse to pay for this shit

Music categorization has always sucked

Just like Radio

Give me back my SD card please

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