Season-appropriate greetings everyone! As such, the ritual of compiling a best-of-year playlist continues. Predictably, it generally eschews well established artists (exception: Bowie) and is bent to my aging tastes, mostly soft-ish pop/rock with a few instrumental pieces thrown in. I’ve published it on Deezer and Spotify.
Surprisingly I survived all of tretcherous 2016 on Deezer. The platform didn’t improve at all over the year but I’ve come to rely upon a set of features: collaborative playlists with comments, LastFM scrobbling and play-next (insert at top of queue). The ex-Lala/MOG/Lala new-release hunter-gatherer tribe remaining on Deezer has dwindled down to just a few souls and has continued the tradition of unearthing the best of new and unknown artists. However, we are missing obscure selections made by the most erudite folks of the Lala era. C’est dommage.
In other news, in January, Pandora will be launching its premium subscription Spotify/Apple/Google/Amazon on-demand competitor (news via Forbes and Verge). Early indications are the only DNA scraped from the carcass of Rdio is it’s slick UI design. The industry press is saying “too-little, too-late”, but I believe they have some capital in the form of it’s long-time users who have ever pressed the thumbs-up button [I could be wrong, but I believe the Pandora thumbs-up predates Facebook Like]. Imagine one button to play a stream of everything you liked from an era. Could be either glorious or scary!
unhillbilly 