Music serves a particularly important function in my life, especially given my depressive moods and discomfort with emotional.
Long before I learned that emotions are a good thing that people should be comfortable with, whenever I would be in bad headspaces music was the thing that would regulate me back into functional states. Different songs (or albums, or artists) would place me in particular headspaces, and eventually I’d learn how to curate my mood based on what I was listening to.
Whenever I wanted to explain aggravatingly non-discrete thoughts, I’d try to use music as the communication medium. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t :P I have since accepted that it’s a suboptimal way of communicating my state, but when I’m in a weird or depressive mood, posting music as it defines my headspace is a comfortable way of asserting my voice, even if it’s only to myself and a public form of logging into the void.
When I was a kid, or even in university, it seemed very easy for me to keep up on what “the kids” were listening to. I was up to date on classic and alternative rock during my pre-university years, and by university I had discovered Pitchfork.
But ever since moving to Toronto I’ve been losing touch, and I’ve been expanding the genres I listen to outside of spaces with easy narrative. As I focus on music coming out today, there’s no historical perspective. Because I want music that tickles the things that excite me over a history of jazz, hip-hop, electronic musics, rock genres, I find myself liking one out of ten new artists I hear (or less.)
As I wonder why so many people get so nostalgic about the past as they get older, I think of my own musical choices, and how the musical terrain was once an open field and today for me it very much still is, but I have a more crystallized sense of what I persistently enjoy and what I don’t.
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I had been on my beloved Rdio until it died, and it was pretty good at informing me of releases as they came out, but I still generally had to listen to everything and figure out what I liked. Given that I have never thought in playlists, I used their “play music based around Artist X or your favourites or your friends’ activity” and it was ok.
Since Rdio’s untimely demise, I switched to Deezer. The player is as close to a clean UI as I’ve seen from any of the alternatives, through there are some very elegant Rdio featues I absolutely miss (like seamless switching of playback from mobile to desktop devices.1
What really won me over was this: When I first signed in, Deezer asked me to pick from a bunch of popular bands, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Tupac, household names like that. Not unexpected and would at least get a coarse profile of me. It probably also sucked in my Facebook info and my last.fm profile, and I’m one of those people not afraid of Facebook snitching my music history to anyone who would ask.
One of the first things I noticed was a pre-made playlist, apparently “custom” made of me. I took a look at some of the contents: it had the Nirvana and Cure and OutKast, okay, not bad. But it also had the following:
That really impressed me. It also had a little section that recommended random artists; the first thing it recommended was my beloved Souvlaki by Slowdive. I was impresssed with that opening experience over competitors like Tidal and Spotify2.
Since then I’ve found myself using their “Flow” feature more and more, basically deciding what I want to listen to instead of picking music myself. It grounds itself in the music I have selected as “favourite” (which usually means music I’ve paid for as far as my categorization scheme is concerned) but it constantly throws me oddballs and randos that I’m happy with.
More importantly, wheras when I curate music myself I tend to reinforce the emotional state I’m currently in or want to be, unlike Rdio I find the Deezer robots are always appropriate to the mood I’m currently in (don’t ask me how or why) and almost always wind up improving my mood the way Vitamin D would, without always convering onto the same kind of music every time.
So in conclusion, I’m very much in love with the robots Deezer has employed to handle the DJing, and the’ve surpassed the best DJ I ever met in my life, myself :)
BTW, I am one of those “niche” customers that apparently signal the kiss of death for a product. So be warned, and please don’t mind if I kind of resent most people for choosing popular options even as I resign myself to this sorry pattern in my life :) ↩
Who I maintain has a criminally awful user interface and is only popular through shoving their name everywhere and who will probably be the last player standing alongside Google and Apple Musics and I hate you all forever :) ↩