I use Yahoo! Music for most of my music-listening at work. I like the service and at $60 for two years (they had a special when I signed up, the regular now is $72/year) it’s a great deal.
The system allows the user to customize various stations by giving it feedback about what songs and artists are of interest.* It’s a helpful feature, for the most part. But I think services like this might want to tweak the system so certain songs are kept off playlists at certain times of the year. I am not suggesting that they should be banned, of course, but perhaps not streamed unless sought out actively by the user.
I may like Boney M, but I really have absolutely no interest in listening to a Christmas song from them in the middle of May.
This reminds me of the dance club I used to go to in Budapest when I was in high school. One of the most popular Jive songs at the club was Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree . It was very bizarre to listen to it over and over again in June.
[*] For those who don’t know about Y!M, this is just one of the many ways one can listen to music on this sytem. Yes, I am aware of Pandora, last.fm, etc.
{ 12 comments }
Amanda 05.18.07 at 2:35 am
I was very much into Yahoo Music but then I got a Mac and last I looked Yahoo didn’t support it.
Rich B. 05.18.07 at 3:41 am
I thought that it was market gaps such as lack-of-Christmas-carols-in-May that Internet radio was intended to fill.
It certainly couldn’t be just to have 1,000 different places to listen to the same 12 indie-rock songs that “you’ll never hear on your local Top 40 station.”
Chris Bertram 05.18.07 at 8:36 am
“Sorry, OS 8.5 or higher (not OS X), Netscape 4.5 (not 6.0+), and Windows Media Player 7.0+ required”
Not good.
Ben 05.18.07 at 9:21 am
When I was at college, every college disco ended with The Specials’ “Free Nelson Mandela”. The college was quite right on and this was one of its little ways of doing its bit. People loved it – “Free Nelson Mandela” was every student’s cue to go a little wild and stop dancing awkwardly with that shy girl from the physics lectures who looked cute after a few pints and some suitably dim lighting.
Then Nelson Mandela was freed. So there didn’t seem much point in playing “Free Nelson Mandela” any more. The first and only time the collge DJ played a different song nobody knew it was the last song and the disco ended as damp squibb.
Unfortunately for Mr Mandela, the college has subsequently refused to acknowledge his liberty on college disco nights so its students know when the party’s over.
bad Jim 05.18.07 at 9:47 am
The industry in which I used to work had the same relationship to “YMCA”. One dances.
Ben Saunders 05.18.07 at 10:56 am
I just play my own harddrive’s collection of music on random most of the time, and get the same problem. I suppose I could delete Christmas songs after the day itself, and then rip them again around November, but that seems too much effort…
Re #4: When I was an undergraduate, I was once at a party in college where the DJ played Semisonic’s ‘Closing Time’ – which left everyone grinning happily – but turned out, bizarrely, to be the penultimate song.
fred lapides 05.18.07 at 11:30 am
memory lane. when in high school and early days of college, at a dance, the final song was Stardust. That was signal that there would be no more. Everyone knew this convention an d everyone danced to that grand tune. Now I play it and dance with my wife to that song every New Year’s eve, at midnight, of couse.
jay bee 05.18.07 at 1:10 pm
With a 20 year university reunion next week I’ve been putting an appropriate playlist for the night. I had originally included “Free Nelson Mandela” but as ben says it doesn’t quite sound right.
On the other hand I was also going to stick the Pet Shop Boys “Being Boring” on the playlist (it’s not of the time but the sentiments of the song seem appropriate) until the line “…some are here and some are missing, in the 1990s…” hit me like a clanger.
Jacob Christensen 05.18.07 at 1:56 pm
@Chris Bartram: The full specifications for Mac-users are truly hilarious:
Are you ready to party like it’s 1999?
Oh, well: We mac-heads will sit and grouch with our diePods.
PS: While we’re at it, don’t forget Lou Reed’s X-Mas in February – which can be played all year around.
Luther Blissett 05.18.07 at 1:59 pm
Ben, your comments reminds me of some grafitti a South African friend of mine told me about.
Beneath the original grafitti, “Free Nelson Mandela,” someone later scribbed “In Every Box of Rice Crispies.”
In bad taste? Sure. Funny as hell? Indeed. Living in Philly for several years, I always replied “In every box of Rice Krispies” whenever someone said “Free Mumia” to me.
In other news, my iTunes library is up to 86 gigs. I’ve been loading a ton of postpunk and New Pop from 1978-1985. My goal over the next few weeks to produce a multi-disc mix of this music, sort of a soundtrack to *Rip It Up and Start Again*. Scritti Politti’s “Skank Bloc Bologna” to, well, Scritti Politti’s “Wood Beez.” The birth and death of forward looking music, before retro took over.
jay bee 05.18.07 at 5:06 pm
That’ll be some sound track but when you’re finished you’ll have to do another one for ‘Bring The Noise’ (no bold unfortunately) and you won’t be left with much change out of your 86gigs
Evan 05.18.07 at 10:57 pm
Oh dear. Those hilariously wrong Mac “requirements” (Windows Media Player 7 on Mac OS 8.5) used to be posted on the US site as well. Apparently the UK help pages were not fixed up at the same time. Anyway, the up-to-date requirements are here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/music/launchcast/basics/launchcast-need.html
No Mac support, although people report that you can get it to work just fine using Parallels.
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