The Stream Team

D_Percy_Prettywillie

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This is neither about Olympic rowers with boners nor golden shower so if that's why you clicked the link, I'd back out now and avoid disappointment. (That's different subforum, I'm pretty sure.)

If you're anything like me your smartphone is basically for three things; texting, an emergency porn source when your crappy ISP does "system maintenance" at 3 am and music.

I have around 50 gigs of music on my phone. Still, there are mornings when I'm headed to work and worse, days when I'm at work that I just can't find the right series of songs to put me in whatever mood I'm after. This same idea applies to hosting parties or any time I'm ever expected to play music for other people. (They're only going to put up with so many Aimee Mann songs before they're going to start inventing reasons to get as far away from me as possible.)

Technology has provided the answer in the form of a handful of apps. You're familiar with all or most of them no doubt; I Heart Radio, Pandora, Spotify, and relative newcomer- Songza.

I was a huge fan of Pandora for a really long time. The ability to select music, basically by a code written to recognize patterns within music, was revolutionary at its inception. Thirteen years later... and I'm not feelin' the mode. Tenacious D songs might share some mathematical progression similar to Fun. but they're not the same thing. There's a paid version where you can skip more songs, more frequently... but that's just what it is- you pay more so you can skip more. That's the whole problem I have with paying Comcast or DirectTV for cable.

It's a similar stigma shared by I Heart Radio- just because I felt like shaking my non-existent ass to a few Beyonce songs doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy the scattering (you read that exactly right) of Nicki Minaj "tracks" throughout its meandering musical attempt to get my butt to bounce.

Enter Spotify; this App sets itself apart in that unlike the aforementioned two, it has a contract with the record labels, enabling users to find a specific song and play it. You do that a few times, thumbs up "Closing Time," and "Time of Your Life" and "Broadway is Dark Tonight" and all of the sudden you've given Skynet (I assume that's what all computer databases programmed to do anything even remotely resembling thinking are called) enough information to generate a playlist that suits your mood. The wikipedia page lists the specific restrictions, however, and they're... not uncomplicated. The other downside is that it costs about as much as a Hulu Plus subscription per month and it's 2012-

The internet has spoken and media should be free (even if a handful of holdouts are still willing to pay for convenience.)

The other thing worth mentioning with Spotify is its partnership with Shazam (an app designed to identify music playing out loud in the mens room at Kum & Go [google it- it's a gas station] or Banana Republic [also not what you might think]). You hold up your Galaxy S3 or iPhone 5, identify the song, tap the Spotify link and you can listen to the song right then an there.

Discovering new music is as important to me as being able to listen to the stuff I already know I love.

And that's where Songza comes in. It is still a play list based software (they have to be, right?) The difference is that Songza will identify the time of day it is, what mood you're trying to set (they've got everything from "Waking up Happy" to "Trying to Get Lucky"), and will then generate three play lists based on what you select. The more you thumbs up or thumbs down tracks, the better it is able to put you in that mood with the play lists the "Concierge" generates when you open the app. They've hired people to do this more than the others, which rely more on coding. There's no way to play a specific song but you can go to specific artists (the Aimee Mann channel plays nothing but Aimee Mann... just fyi.)

This app also alleviates the responsibility of being an... MP3-J? (If that's not copyrighted yet, it is now.) At work or at a party, I ain't got time to make sure "Rape Me" doesn't sneak into a Pandora station just because I wanted to listen to something "Creep" like an hour ago. Songza generates "Safe For Work" moods that can be anything from "You work at The Office, here are a few songs to make you feel more clever" to "You work in Mordor, here are a few songs to whip your slaves to."

Songza is free and was the most popular app in the App Store for a while. If you're sick of the 50+ gigs of music you lug around in your text-o-porn-o-player (also copyright), try it out and post what you think.


I'll also say, just for the record, if you're brand new to all of these apps, try them all (even Spotify has a free trial period.) I glossed over a lot of the peripheral features of each (like sharing play lists and literal radio interception) because I assume the 5 people who read this already knew about that stuff. They're all worth a go, but Songza, for now, has my vote as... [insert musical pun.]




JSZ​