So I went and got myself a job in the biz, which is a small piece of why this place has been so dead of late. The net effect of my new job has been to extinguish, with prejudice, the last few moments of the day when I was not obsessing over music. I guess there's a little time left over to puzzle over new and exotic ways to do marginally useful things with SQL, but mostly music, metadata, the music business, my music collection, and looking for ways to find new music govern my thoughts. My job is to help tend Rhapsody's music catalog, which is an enormous, moody beast. It's a good job for me, and a good use of my skills.
While I still have things to say about new music (and some of those things will probably start trickling out here again once I figure out how I want to present them), I need a place to put some of my thoughts about music in the digital age, and for the next whatever, that's what The Slacker's Guide is going to be. It's news to nobody that the music industry has been thrown into nearly total disarray by the advent of digital music, in all of its forms, and I'm belatedly realizing that I have about as good an idea of what's going on as anyone (which still isn't saying much).
I believe that we – music fans, independent musicians and label owners, software engineers, and the digital music industry as a whole – have an opportunity to change how people relate to music, for the better, but without some careful thinking and a healthy dose of humility (guess who's not a huge fan of “Web 2.0”? That's right, MEEEE!), it's just going to be a rehash of the disgusting excesses of the dotcom years all over again: endless PR, mind-numbing buzzwords, and nothing substantial to show for it once all the talking stops. My interest in all this is tying everything together in such a way that I'm left with a bunch of services I really want to use. My self-interested assumption is that if I solve these problems for myself, I'll be solving them for a lot of other people as well.
To kick things off, here's a rundown of how I listen to music these days, which I'll be picking apart over the coming weeks:
- Everything is centered around the 40GB iPod (グレテル) my mom gave me for my birthday a couple years ago. I carry it with me when I leave the house, and at home it's pretty much the only source in use by my stereo. CDs get ripped and added to the library as soon as they're purchased. At the moment, it has 5,460 tracks on it, but 103 of those don't count because they're special control files for my (somewhat lackluster) Griffin iTrip. 2,225 of those are in a big playlist I call “essentials”, and the rest comprise my purchases for the last year or so (and last year was a light year for me).
- I use iTunes to manage everything. Rhythmbox, foobar2000, Amarok, and Songbird all have their strengths, but nothing else balances the simplicity of iTunes' iPod management with the power of its smart playlists. More to the point, most music managers crumple under the weight of my 37,813 track library – the vast majority of which was painstakingly ripped and encoded from my own CD collection by yours truly, should any of you be music industry munchkins trolling about. iTunes is having issues, too, but I can handle them.
- My little musical god is an iTunes smart playlist called “the unknown”. It's a list of all of the non-iTrip tracks on グレテル I've heard 3 or fewer times, sorted by the last time I listened to them. I start my day by starting with the first track on the playlist with グレテル set up to shuffle the list by album. Despite the iPod shuffle algorithm having glaring weaknesses, this turns out to be a surprisingly satisfying way to balance the breadth of my collection with the desire to actually get to know all my music. Once an album's been played 4 times, I generally have a pretty good idea if I want to keep it available for immediate access for the long haul, and I'm assured of having a steady stream of new and interesting stuff playing without having to think about what comes next. Right now it's playing 4 Hero's Parallel Universe, but earlier it was playing Renegade Soundwave and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Next up is Superchunk. Playing an album at a time helps mitigate a lot of the schizophrenia that comes with shuffle play – too much track-level shuffling and I start to lose it, as NWA follows Shostakovich follows Autechre.
- I sync with iTunes once a day. First and foremost, this updates “the unknown”, culling out the tracks I've now heard enough and re-sorting the remaining tracks. Secondly, I run a little program called iScrobbler that watches what I listen to and reports it to last.fm. This allows me to do neat things like the following, which is an automatically updating chart of my top 10 most-listened artists:
- One of the perks of working at Rhapsody is that I get a free Rhapsody account, and given how much time I sink into work, it only makes sense to sample the product, so I've been using Rhapsody when I'm in the office. It's a little frustrating, because a lot of my favorite artists aren't even faint traces on Rhapsody's radar (and some, like Hafler Trio, are almost certainly much happier that way), and sometimes the encoding quality makes my ears hurt (we're limited by what the labels submit to us), but I've found good albums by The Standard, Art Brut, Miss Kittin (or, rather, some amazing, rare LFO remixes of Miss Kittin tracks), and a ton of great stuff by John Fahey. More John Fahey is never a bad thing.
- When I'm feeling aimless and in the mood for something new, I turn to Pandora. last.fm has “radio” of its own, and it provides a lot of tools for research for the diligent musical obsessive, but with Pandora, I can say “play me stuff that sounds like Meshuggah” and it'll do mostly that. (I have much more to say on the subject of music recommendation services. I might just share some of that here.)
I bring all this up not to show off (well, OK, maybe a little), but to show how much effort I'm willing to expend to feed my habit. I actually have a workflow for listening to music, but the flip side is that I think over time this is going to deepen my relationship with my music collection and save me a whole lot of money. Subscription music services are one piece of it (and I have more to say about that as well), but a big piece is that having a system automatically playing stuff I like helps me realize how much great music I already have. Novelty-seeking is a huge part of being a fan of weird music, but I've heard enough music that it's hard for me to find anything that strikes me as genuinely new, so I look for different things from my music now. My current listening regime helps me find those things.
This is obviously a very creaky contraption, but it seems to be working pretty well. I rarely find myself in the rut of listening to the same five albums over and over, which is the perpetual bane of music fans with carousel CD players. My last.fm charts may or may not reflect my tastes accurately, but they do demonstrate that I tend to listen to a lot of music (30,000 tracks in under a year) and that I tend to listen to a vastly diverse array of stuff. Also, I get to wreck the curve on last.fm with my oddball tastes, which is fun. Most importantly, I'm not in any danger of falling into a musical rut.
When I get another chance, I'll spend some time talking about what's out there right now in terms of recommendation services, as well as the promise and limitations of communities when it comes to music. I hope someone out there finds this useful.
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