Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Damn the Music Man

Okay so I have determined the radio sucks everywhere…. Wait I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Since I only own an I-pod shuffle I am limited to what CDs I bring to work or what I can find on line to listen to, because I can’t get the shuffle to get me through the day in the office. This didn’t used to be a big deal for me, because I found the website Imeem.com, which was cool ‘cause I could make my own on line playlists, listen to other peoples play lists, or listen to full albums. Now not every song/album I wanted to listen to from every artist was available, but I still had a pretty good selection of music to choose from. Then ‘The Man’ had to come along and ruin everything.

To keep everyone in the office productive, limit exposure to offensive materials, keep people from taking up to much band width, and try to minimize exposure to viruses, sites like MySpace, Face Book, YouTube, and pretty much anything fun have been blocked. Again not a big deal I don’t have to be that connected all the time, and for those folks who have to tweet while at work they have smart phones (naughty, naughty people finding a way around the system). I could still get my music on Imeem though till in an attempt to try to keep their site afloat MySpace bought them. The fuckers! Now I am limited to internet radio.

Since the hostile take over of my listening pleasure I have experimented with different players (that aren’t blocked), different stations on those players, and find one thing to be common among them all. With the plethora of music out there they all play basically the same thing. If you listen to any pop station hearing the same songs over and over again is to be expected, but I am typically bouncing around different alternative music stations, and I can’t get anything remotely non mainstream. Modern rock everyone plays the same thing. Alternative mix same top 10 new artists for the genre and formerly top 10 artists with an occasional upstart. Hell I even found a punk station and they cycle through the same artists over and over again. You would think with internet radio and listening to stations in different demographic areas there would be some mix in there, and if it was from a station based in a larger or even costal metropolitan area (they are a head of the Midwest on basically all trends in everything else) I could find some new music being played.

Come on folks we have all these awesome artists out there playing sold out shows in small to mid sized venues, with awesome riffs and killer lyrics and I can’t find a damn one of them to listen to. I seriously have a wider variety of music in the 400 CDs on the shelf in my living room than radio stations have on their playlists. Is there some corporate decision some where to hide over half the good music out there? I almost want to buy a radio station so I can higher a random 15 year old, some 20 year old kid working for a college radio station, and an aging alternative hipster to design the play list for my radio station. That covers your three main demographics, I imagine you’d actually get a good following, and you’d get diversity of music instead of one good song hidden amongst songs and artists I’ve already heard 10 times in one day.

If this mystery station does exist, please let me know and send me a link to it. If not I will accept donations to start the greatest radio station ever.