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The Hope of the World

7 December, 2014

A few months ago, I got a new car (a 2015 Mazda CX-5). Among the many features that it offered through the in-dashboard display was Pandora connectivity. I’d never really bothered with any of the music streaming services, as I like to believe that I have better taste than some computer algorithm, and I have an extensive enough music collection to avoid getting bored with it. I’d already had Sirius satelilte radio installed to save me the horrors of FM radio, and typically spend my (recently doubled) drive time listening to Sirius XMU, which generally plays a pretty decent selection of new alternative/indie/college type stuff (except for a couple of godawful Blog Radio programmes (with the single exception of Hipster Runoff with Carles), which are about the only thing Sirius brought to the table when they and XM Radio merged a few years back). Sirius XMU also provide several hundred other stations, but most of those seem to be sports (in which I have little interest in watching, let alone listening to some old duffer talk about), and a selection of ‘specialist’ stations (including Grateful Dead Radio, Pearl Jam Radio, Elvis Radio, etc. – how come there’s no Bob Dylan Radio?? If anyone has enough of a back catalog to keep an entire station busy (I personally have 82 albums of his…), it’s Dylan, so WTF Sirius XM??), so I pretty much confine myself to XMU (which bills itself as “indie rock”, but really covers the whole gamut from alt to indie).

If XMU ever plays anything I can’t stand to sit through three minutes of (such as anything by Vampire Weekend) then I can just use the car’s Bluetooth connectivity to play any of the 1,358 albums from my own music collection that I have stored on a 128GB micro-SD card in my BlackBerry Passport. I could also attach my iPod via the car’s USB port, but since I moved all my music to my BlackBerry I don’t tend to use that much at all any more (plus, I’m trying to wean my household off Apple products). And if I really want to go old school, there’s also a 3.5mm jack that I can use to attach any other mobile music source to my car. Oh, and there’s also a CD player, to justify my insistence on still buying physical CDs (you’ll all be begging to borrow them when The Cloud crashes!). So, all told, I have more than enough music choices in my car without turning to the streaming services.

But like I say, the car came with Pandora, and I’m incapable of leaving any technological advancement untried, so I thought I’d give it a go. Actually, although the car has a dedicated Pandora (soft) button, it actually just connects to your phone (via said Bluetooth) to access the Pandora app from there. Which meant that I first had to install Pandora on my phone. There is no dedicated Blackberry app, so I downloaded the Android app, which works perfectly, thanks to BlackBerry’s BB10 OS having Android Runtime 4.3 baked-in. Actually, given that the car just plays Pandora via the app on your phone, there’s no real need for a Pandora button at all – I could just play the Pandora app on my phone and stream that through the regular Bluetooth option (the same as when I play any of the actual music on my phone – although then I’d lose the upvote/downvote and bookmark options…).

In-car DisplayOnce I’d signed up for Pandora, and ‘connected’ it to my car, I had to find something to listen to. There’s a bunch of built-in channels, but one of Pandora’s strong selling point is the ability to effectively define your own radio station. I’d just bought myself the reissue of Ride‘s excellent Going Blank Again (a shoegaze classic) so I plugged in a search term of “shoegaze” and entrusted myself to its algorithms. What it calls shoegaze is a bit hit and miss, as although it features classics like Lush, Chapterhouse, Revolver, My Bloody Valentine, and of course Ride pretty heavily, they also throw in a fair amount post-rock, and the occasional bit of old-school stuff like Joy Division, New Order, and even The Smiths (and a lot of Cocteau Twins whom I’ve always considered uncategorizable – although Wikipedia handily lists them as “ethereal wave”…). None of which music I object to, but still, I wouldn’t call it shoegaze. So I renamed my Pandora ‘station’ to “Stuff Dirk Likes” which is a bit more accurate, and looks cool on my car’s display. Pandora does tell you why it has included the tracks it plays, via classifications that come from the Music Genome Project, and the stuff I like seems to feature “basic rock song structures”, “mild rhythmic syncopation”, and “excessive vamping”, so I guess that instead of referring to myself generically as an “(ageing) indie kid” I should really be referring to myself specifically as a “basic syncopation vamp” – although I’m sure that would raise more questions than it answers…

Given that I now have Pandora on my phone, I’ve tried listening to the app at my desk at work (they blocked all streaming services from the company network several years ago, when it turned out that someone [thankfully unidentified] was taking up too much bandwidth by streaming internet radio all day every day), but the pop-up advertisements drive me crazy. One pops up at the start of every song (so that’s like, what, every 10-15 minutes on the post-rock channel!), over the top of the artist/song/album info, so you have to click on the ad to close it, just to see what’s playing (very sneaky way of forcing you to pay attention to the ad!). Thankfully, i don’t really have to actually look at the app too much, as my Blackberry will tell me what song is playing right from the lock screen, but it’s still irritating. Plus, even though I have an unlimited data plan, I don’t really like the idea of streaming music for 8 hours straight when I can just listen to the music on my phone and save the bandwidth for actual work stuff (dammit, they’ve got me thinking like them…!).

I also discovered that I can set Pandora up as a music source on my Sonos system, so I can now stream Pandora throughout (five rooms in) my house. Which I do. This actually works out pretty well, as I don’t get any pop-up adverts (the Sonos system doesn’t have a screen on which to display them) and it doesn’t seem to have a lot of audio adverts (certainly less than the mobile version). So I’ve been listening to Pandora at home a lot (and am listening to it as I type this), although I do feel as though I’m cheating on Jim and Wanda at 3WK.com, my other reliable internet radio choice (Mazda should really pre-install 3WK in all their cars and give everyone the gift of great music…). I don’t know that I’d ever pay for Pandora (which would remove the adverts) – I don’t even pay for 3WK and I looove that – but I have gone out and bought several CDs (yes, still…) of stuff I’ve heard on Pandora (Blonde Redhead, Mazzy Star (again, not shoegaze, but how did I miss them for so long??), The Warlocks, more M83, even more Cocteau Twins…) so I figure I’m still supporting the artist not the medium (an important distinction).

So, despite my earlier reservations, I’m now quite happy to have my aural pleasure dictated by a computer algorithm. And I’m painfully aware that, despite my precious, wannabe-hipster musical philosophy, I’ve had my entire approach to ‘consuming’ music changed not by a friend who’s a musical guide/guru, or by a new genre, but by a car. How rock’n’roll is that&#8253

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