A voracious appetite for tunage

March 23, Suzanne Arlie Park

I guess my days of daily blogging are gone for now. I’d rather turn on the RFR transmitter and broadcast for a few hours. This week, though, my buddy DJ Paddles said he might be doing some shows on Exciting Drink Radio before he starts his new job next week. So I’m hanging back, hoping he gets on the air this morning. The more Mixcloud streamers I get to know, the more I feel like I need to be mindful of who’s on the air and try not to “compete” with them. Sometimes it just happens—I forget to check the Live page, usually. There also DJs who get on the air very often, like me, so it’s kind of impossible (and pointless) to try to avoid transmitting simultaneously. To be honest, I actually enjoy broadcasting more than I do listening to broadcasts, so there’s that.

This week’s weather looks to be lovely, so we’re planning to hike as much as we can. Yesterday we finally got back to our traditional Sunday location: Suzanne Arlie Park, situated between Lane Community College, Goshen, and Mount Baldy. The sky was overcast, but with a really cool cloud texture rather than flat gray.

The last few evenings I’ve been digging deep into the history of my Spotify account—weeding, sorting, and organizing old playlists and folders. I first subscribed to the Stockholm-based audio streaming service back in the summer of 2013, and from the evidence (add-dates on tracks in old playlists), I really started using it hard during 2014-2016. My first playlists were overwhelmingly complete albums, of which I saved hundreds, many sorted into “year” folders, but many more piled into folders unsorted. All of those are still there, sitting near the bottom of my collection in the sidebar (I generally use the desktop app rather than phone app). After that obsession with saving entire albums wore off, I’ve mainly used Spotify to create many hundreds of “mixtape” style playlists, some super eclectic and others more thematically unified.

Over the years, I’ve hit “pause” and “play” on my Spotify subscription many times, depending on whether I was actively using it or not. E.g., I’d go for a couple or three months of heavy use, then notice I’d left it alone for some time, so I’d cancel until the next time I wanted to use it. But for the last three years or so, I’d say, I use Spotify all the time. Along with my MP3 collection (plus our CDs and records), it’s a main source for tracks on my radio shows, and I also use it to  compose mix CDs for friends.

Last year, we upgraded to the Basic Duo plan, which lets both Mrs. Random and me have our own separate accounts for one discounted price. Also last year we bought a cheap Windows laptop to run Spotify (and Mixcloud) music through our main hi-fi stereo system. We also play CDs and cassettes and records on the hi-fi. In the evenings we enjoy jazz, classical, and space music, especially.

If you’ve never used a major music streaming service, it might be hard to imagine how amazing and useful it can be, especially for a music fiend with a voracious appetite for tunage. While it’s true that there is a lot of music not on Spotify (or Tidal or Apple Music, etc.), what is there represents the entire history of recorded sounds. In addition to new albums and singles, I’m always coming across amazing recordings from decades past, and a little digging often reveals entire subgenres and localized scenes I’ve never heard of. There is so much music!