🎄 Holidays! Stupid Sirius Radio "Holiday" stations

[Mike Blakesley]

I worked alone at the store today, so I had a chance to sample in-depth a couple of the "holiday" (can't say Christmas, oh no no no) stations on the Sirius service.

First I went with "Holly," which is a contemporary station. This starts out fine, until you realize that it all sounds the same -- a lot of Mariah Carey-ish singers and bland Justin Bieber-type renditions of various familiar classic songs that are so butchered, they're often unrecognizable. Adding thousands of extra notes is not what you're supposed to do with songs everybody knows.

After about an hour or so, I'd had enough so I switched over to "Holiday Traditions," which purports to be more of the familiar stuff we all know and love (or love to hate). So far so good, the warm tones of Bing Crosby or Perry Como or Ray Conniff sounded good.

But after a while I realized that this station is not programmed at all, it's just a random computer generated playlist. How do we know this? Because there's no rhyme or reason. You'll hear "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby, then maybe 15 minutes later you might hear "White Christmas" by the Mitch Miller gang, and then another few minutes later you might hear the same song again by yet another artist.

Upon fiddling around with the computer I realized that this particular station can be custom-mixed, so I set it to "more instrumentals" (better for the retail environment) and "more evergreens." I celebrated at first, because the very first song to come up was Herb Alpert's stellar rendition of "My Favorite Things" which is one of my favorite songs ever. But then I realized that the "custom mix" just serves to choke down the playlist; now, instead of hearing the same song repeated by different artists, you're likely to hear the same VERSION of songs repeated. By the end of the day I'd heard "My Favorite Things" by Herb Alpert, three times.

Why is this so complicated? Why can't they just program a station to play a nice variety of music (old and new), and use some logic with the song choices?

This is why I'll never be a big fan of random streaming services. They just can't satisfy a listener who actually cares what he hears, I guess.

 

[Bobberman]

I Never listen to those streaming services i have better success with the Cds i ripped to my laptop and playback thru windows media player and mine usually never repeats excessively especially with the shuffle mode. I found the same problem with most online audio streaming services in general. So Mike You Are Not alone in your frustration.

 

[Rudy]

I worked alone at the store today, so I had a chance to sample in-depth a couple of the "holiday" (can't say Christmas, oh no no no) stations on the Sirius service.

Was that via the computer, or on a SiriusXM receiver?

Since those are not stations that are hosted by a DJ, then I would fully expect them to be fully automated (via computer). They could stand to adjust their algorithms a bit to weed out those duplicates--with the song titles being the same, it should be a no-brainer. I also realize that compared to music at large, the relative number of Xmas songs are far fewer in number. So I could see some tunes repeating, but certainly not more than once per hour.

That had to beat the wretched channel our local Mexican restaurant was playing, which was mixing up more modern tracks with some from the 70s and 80s. Nothing instrumental or easygoing. My daughter (18) can't stand most of today's music, so she was fit to be tied also. (She threatens to send Bieber back to Canada, but we don't want them on our bad side. )

I have thought about trying Pandora to see how it might stream a Xmas station to my liking. My best handful of stations have been hand-tuned, a couple of them for five or six years. Just turning it on and streaming it...no, it won't do what we want right away. But if I give a thumbs up to every song I really like and a thumbs down to songs I can't stand, that goes a long way toward steering it in the right direction. Adding different "seed" tracks or artists to that station will also help reroute it to where I want it to be.

I had an 80s station but found it was playing too much pop and not enough of what I wanted--I originally started with Hall & Oates a few years back. So I added Tears For Fears, and that got it a lot closer. And as more different tunes came into rotation, I decided to add Depeche Mode, and now I have about what I'm looking for.

It sounds like it could be a lot of work, but it's not, really--just leaning over and tapping an icon on the tablet (or computer screen) while listening is all it takes. I'm at the point where my best stations can play for hours without my having to change to something else.

I only haven't bothered with the Xmas station idea since I don't like the music enough to listen to it for more than an hour or so, and only a couple of days out of the year.

But I will say this for my other stations--I've discovered far more new (to me) music using Pandora, than any other streaming service I've ever used. Terrestrial radio hasn't done that for me since the mid 80s (if you heard our local radio, you'd understand), and satellite hasn't since Sirius destroyed bought out XM.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

I have the computer version here at work. Just background music.

I've tried Pandora and couple of others. What I've found out is, if I type in Herb Alpert, it tends to play one Herb Alpert song followed by 10 or 12 other instrumental songs from the 60s, most of which are elevator music type things. I think I have a pretty wide musical taste, but my taste for '60s instrumental stuff is pretty narrow (mostly...Herb, Julius and Burt, and maybe a little Hugo Montenegro for good measure...but not much else.) Same with Sergio Mendes... I haven't really heard many other Brazilian music artists from the '60s that I warm up to. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's because the related music tends to be "pure" Brasilian, where Sergio's own stuff is more American pop-ized and thus I like it better. I dunno. I'm better off, like Bobberman, playing my own CDs so I hear what I want. But at work it's just background noise so I can be less picky.

 

[Rudy]

Pandora works on a principle of what they call "music genomes." So when choosing Herb, you're telling Pandora to play other music that sounds like Herb's (based on different traits assigned to each tune). From another angle, you might pick Janet Jackson and The Time, and get Herb's tunes from Keep Your Eye On Me. It will give a subtle preference to an artist, naturally. But I once tried to do something like an A&M-influenced station and didn't get very far.

I should play around further with a Sergio Mendes station. I'm thinking there must be another artist, or some other selections I could make, which would steer it to more of the pop-music side of Brazilian. For instance, there are some tracks from George Duke's Brazilian Love Affair that easily could have passed for "lost" Sergio Mendes tracks. (Duke's album, and Mendes' albums, actually do share some of the same musicians and composers! I'm surprised nobody else at the Corner has ever noticed this.) It would take some time to "train" the station but again, a simple tap on an icon is all it takes.

The thing with Sergio's music as a whole is that he has covered so many styles, you're only starting a Pandora station using his entire body of work when using his name and not "training" the station. My preference is for his early pre-Brasil '66 recordings, many being jazz combos, so anything similar would get a thumbs up from me. He's had the two "pure" Brazilian albums. There are the Brasil '66 recordings. Then, he's had a lot of pop-music covers in the 70s, and had pop hits of his own in the 80s. And then, toss the Timeless album into the mix. It's no wonder Pandora would pick wildly at the outset.

I do play music all day while I work, but I need a break from my own stuff to discover more. So, that's where something like Pandora comes into play.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

I play the "Classic Rewind" and "Classic Vinyl" stations a lot, and I even discover new stuff on those once in a while among the endless repeats of things I've heard a million times. Or quite often there will be a song I've heard a lot but never knew who performed it. so it's fun to be able to look at that info.

 

[Bobberman]

For a brief time a few years ago i tried pandora and Rdio and that did turn me on to some newer stuff But then those services ceased to function properly and i shut down my accounts but im glad i wrote down what i heard on them because i purchased those recordings although they were only availible as downloads i immediately committed them to CD-R and made extra backup copies especially because of the rarity nature of these particular recordings. Because they are not the kind of songs you hear repeatedly anymore

 

[Rudy]

I play the "Classic Rewind" and "Classic Vinyl" stations a lot, and I even discover new stuff on those once in a while among the endless repeats of things I've heard a million times. Or quite often there will be a song I've heard a lot but never knew who performed it. so it's fun to be able to look at that info.

That is why I used to like XM Radio when I had it--on the channels I liked, I often came across songs I had heard for years (if not decades) and finally was able to put a name to the artist and song! So yeah, around that era, I ended up buying a bit since it was like "catching up" on music I'd heard but local radio would never identify, as if we were supposed to guess at it. The in-dash in my ride for now only shows you the station name, artist name or song name, not all of them at once. Inconvenient. Although for my failing eyesight, having those letters be nice and large is a good touch.

So that is what I get now, again, when I have Pandora or one of the TuneIn Radio stations streaming--I get artist, song title and album title, so I know what to look for. TuneIn covers both Internet radio stations (Salsa Warriors is still a favorite ), as well as most of the local HD Radio stations around the US, and many stations in Canada as well.

Automation may have ruined radio stations to some extent, but at least the technology is there to give us the artist and song title if we need it.