Spotify Playlists

A very busy, overloaded time turns into a vacation Saturday afternoon, so while I am excited, I still have a lot of things I need to do, and am feeling a little bit muddled, including regarding knowing what to write about. This week could be technology or music, so the logical place to start is Spotify. Whether the next two days end up being AskFM and Amazon Studios, or respecting other people’s musical choices and please don’t make me defend Katy Perry, I really don’t know yet.

(By the way, rock continues to smile on me. Fall Out Boy is off hiatus and will be here June 18th.)

I have already written about Spotify, and using it over Youtube to check out music before buying, because it seems to be a better way of getting the artists money. It is not perfect. First of all, they don’t pay much at all. It sounds like Pandora pays more, but of course you have less control over that. Also, while a lot of the Youtube videos would not generate anything for the artist, it seems that some do, probably through Vevo especially. So, if anyone has other suggestions for places to listen and explore, I would be interested.

The other issue is that there catalog still has some limitations. I can find a lot, but not everything. A good way to get at this to talk about my attempts to create playlists. For example, I had written some time ago about how there are certain songs that lead into each other for me, and so I thought that would be a good playlist. The proper sequence would be “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, “Cum On Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot, and “Run Run Away” by Slade. All was going fine until Song # 4, and they don’t have it. They have some Slade, but not that one.

So that was frustrating, and ultimately the solution there will be to have everything digital and make playlists in Media Player, which can be done. Also, though, sometimes bands don’t cooperate. The next playlist I made was “Merry Christmas from New Jersey”, and I had contributions from My Chemical Romance, Bon Jovi, and Bruce Springsteen, which was great, and I added “59 Sound” for The Gaslight Anthem, which is not super Christmas-y, but it does reference Marley’s chains, so I went with it, and would it have killed The Misfits to have at some point done a Christmas song? Come on! You have Silent Night, Deadly Night and Santa Clause versus the Martians as source material.

Actually, I suppose they might have; the Spotify catalog for the Misfits is a little spotty. That was actually an issue when I added the two Valentine’s Day lists. If you will recall, last year I posted a love song that I did not find stupid daily from February 1st through 14th, and after mentioning that to Lisa, she gave me her alternatives, which included “Saturday Night”, which took a hold of me, and playing that obsessively led me to My Chemical Romance, and everything that followed from that. Seriously, I still have not been an MCR fan for an entire year. So, I put both of those lists up, but you know which song is missing? “Saturday Night”, which was the most important.

For that issue, what Spotify has for the Misfits seems to lean more to their new configuration, and I don’t know how I feel about that, though they seem to be having more fun now.

Speaking of the Misfits, I did do a Halloween playlist, going from that blog post plus adding some songs I had not known at the time, and that included their “Monster Mash”, because they whole point of that post was that people focus on the original “Monster Mash” and “Thriller” to the point where it’s ridiculous. There’s a nice body of spooky songs out there. True to form though, Spotify does not have “Dracula’s Tango” by Toto Coelo, which would be a good fit.

I have one more playlist, which frankly, is a mess. I started doing it for 12/21/12, where the world did not end, of course, but if it had, what would you listen to. And the problem is that it’s just too much of a hodgepodge. Some of it is apocalyptic, some of it about hope and keeping on, some of it is about specific time constraints, and some of it was just because hey, if I’m on my way out, I want to listen to this one again. Therefore some of it was also reasonable for New Year’s Eve, but it needs better organization.

Actually, I don’t know if I will get back to it. I still have so much else to listen to, and explore, that I don’t know that I need playlists, though I do like my love song one. (Without “Saturday Night”, the only one I really love on Lisa’s is Sparks’ “Eaten by the Monster of Love”.) However, sometimes I think that even when I own the CD (or digital files) that I should still listen on Spotify so the band gets that extra sixteenth of a cent. Plus, if other people click on my lists, then I have gotten them to contribute to supporting bands I like. Well, if I get another good idea for one, I probably will.