Rich Mintz  

One evening last week, while I was cooking dinner, I had a sudden craving to listen to Paul McCartney — not new Paul McCartney, but old Paul McCartney and Wings. And so I put on an album and listened to it through while I cooked. But I don’t own the album, and didn’t actually put it “on” anything — I set my MacBook on the kitchen table, typed “Wings” into the search engine on Rdio,* and about ten seconds later I was listening.

I have mixed feelings about this. Obviously I like being able to listen to whatever comes into my head, when it comes into my head. But using music streaming services sometimes feels like a lot of work. I don’t necessarily want to be my own music programmer; editors and curators have a nonzero value to me. And while I like the idea of shared playlists in theory, in practice they mean I have to do a lot of goddam digging and listen to a lot of stuff I don’t really like when all I really feel like doing is putting on some music and going about my business.

I have less than no interest in curating my own playlists — I never understood the appeal. (Other music-related things I never understood the appeal of: watching music videos, making music videos, caring about music videos.) So usually what happens is I think of a song, or an artist, I put it on, then it ends and a few minutes later I realize I’m listening to… nothing. Obviously back in the prehistoric days (i.e., when I was 13) when people listened to music using “record players” and “cassette players,” one album at a time, this was always the way it was. But can’t computers fix it? Or something?

This is the reason I keep my subscription to Sirius XM streaming radio, even though I don’t listen to it that often. Maybe I should listen to it more, because it usually leaves me in a good mood.

* Note: in a world divided between Rdio people and Spotify people, I am an Rdio person. Spotify makes it a bit easier to know what music your friends like, but that doesn’t help me much (no need to dwell on this, but a lot of the people I know are much younger than I am), and in all other ways I find the Spotify user interface exhaustingly hard to deal with.

If your musical training (like mine) has left you with the ability to pick out “The Entertainer” and “Love Is Here to Stay” on the piano, and not much else, you’ve probably wondered, as I have, exactly what the point is of having a conductor up in front of an orchestra. The players all know the music, and know their instruments; everyone can keep a beat; why do you need that guy, anyway?

This long LA Times story about the purpose of orchestra conductors explains that the conductor is what overlays the music with an interpretation. Apparently orchestras can play without a conductor, but they usually aren’t very good; even if they’re technically proficient, which important orchestras always are, the music often sounds mechanical and soulless without the interpretive overlay of the conductor’s vision.

The article also confirms something that I sort of suspected, which is that most of the baton flourishes that mean anything to the orchestra are referring to points of musical interpretation that have already been discussed and rehearsed in regard to this particular performance. So a particular wave of the baton doesn’t mean, say, “tremolo” to every orchestra across all time, like a sign in ASL; rather, it means something like “ok, now! — do that thing we did in rehearsal at this point,” or “ok, the thing that’s called for in the score around this point starts… now.”

I’ll try to think of something pithy to say about this, but in the meantime I just thought it was interesting.

OK, I’ve done it: I’ve subscribed to Sirius XM satellite radio. This despite owning hundreds of CDs and gigabytes of ripped and downloaded music, having streaming music available at my command bundled with Time Warner and Roku products and services I’ve already paid for, having a Pandora account that I basically like, and, you know, having access to the Internet, which contains for free (for those willing to dig) every single musical note ever played in the history of man, multiplied a zillion times over.

So here’s the deal. In the course of my one-week free trial, I discovered that despite all that music I already had access to, I actually listen to a lot more music via this Sirius XM/iPhone/docking station three-way marriage than I’ve listened to since I gave up my XM subscription. A lot more, like five times as much. And that music involves a broader variety of genres, and a broader variety of songs, including both songs that awaken my nostalgia and songs I’ve never heard of before. And about half of the background music I’m adding to my media diet is directly crowding out background episodes of reality TV. Good stuff, right?

One of the business facts I’m reminded by all this is that people don’t just pay a premium for innovation in product, they pay a premium for innovation in delivery experience, too, and in packaging of that experience, and especially in the consistency and reliability thereof. It’s worth money just not to have to think — to be able to take for granted that something will just work. Netflix figured that out with DVDs-by-mail, and then figured it out again with streaming, and Apple of course figured it out ages ago and has put it into practice half a dozen times, in a range of sectors that are gradually converging. FedEx figured it out, by taking something (overnight delivery via USPS) that was perceived, rightfully or not, as a dicey proposition and making it 100% trustworthy.

So now, wherever I plop myself down, I dock my phone, I hit the Sirius XM button, I fiddle with the display for just a moment, and within 10 seconds I’m listening to an interesting stream of music. I don’t even think; I just do it. Now that’s the kind of reliability I’d happily pay $12 a month for.

I think I’m readdicted to satellite radio (that didn’t take long, did it?). It’s a whole new ballgame now that my iPhone, combined with the docking speakers that are already strategically placed around my life, can play satellite radio anytime I feel like it.* Sure is easier than hauling that boom box around in the car, like I did in 2002!

In honor of my new addictions, here’s a musical gem turned up for me by the inspired programmers at Sirius XM: “Indiana Wants Me” (1970), a Canadian #1 and American #5 hit, by R. Dean Taylor.

*Some of my docking speakers aren’t compatible with iPhone 4. Fortunately, they’re the crappy ones I already hated…

…and that means bluegrass and Nashville country, both via satellite radio and iTunes. Here are a few of the background albums that will keep me productive today:

And here’s a little flavor of what’s rumbling through my office. Or try this:

Or, for a total change of pace, this:

I bought into the idea of satellite radio quite early, right around the time I moved to Atlanta in 1999. Often what brings us to try new technologies is the recommendation of others, but I didn’t need one for this, because satellite radio seemed like a no-brainer — commercial radio at the time was awful (maybe it still is, but who listens anymore?), I was living in a place where I couldn’t get consistent NPR, I missed the bluegrass and community programming on WAMU — and then this New Thing came along.

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.

Sensationalistic, of course. If you actually read the story, what they blame is radio, which is the opposite of social media.

Other comments:

(1) They use the orderly crowd at the Old 97s concert on July 4th weekend as evidence that the new crowd control measures are working. Hello — the Old 97s were a college band, what, 17 years ago? (Evidence: I own their albums. And paid money for them. On physical media. And listen to them on my old-fashioned crank-activated gramophone.) If there is a riot at an Old 97s concert, something has gone Horribly Wrong.

(2) What is a “Canadian rapper”? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

I’m sitting here in my Baltimore hotel having coffee and the music coming over the loudspeaker is the music that was popular the last time I came frequently to Baltimore, when I lived in Washington, in the mid-90s: Everything but the Girl. That could be coincidence.

But from the place I’m sitting, I can look out the window at Pier 6, where Yes (who was current when I was in college in the 1980s) and Peter Frampton (who was current when I was in high school) performed last night.

If the next thing I hear is this or this or this, the music I remember from elementary school, or God forbid this — a song I associate with “being on the way to the dentist, which I know will be followed by a visit to Ship’s if I’m a very good boy” — well, that’ll pretty much prove that someone is messing with my head.