Drowning in Tunes 2
Posted on | May 30, 2004 at 3:25 pm | Comments Off
I have to downgrade my opinion of Siruis Satellite Radio’s Left of Center channel (see previous entry). Though they do play a lot of tunes and bands I’ve heard nowhere else, they sure do repeat a lot of songs. It’s like a Top 40 of college-indie rock. Most annoyingly, they seem to focus on one song per album or artist, and don’t usually play anything else from the artist’s catalog. Though I really like Nada Surf’s “Inside of Love” and Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” (I’ve got the CDs they appear on, after all), I’m already sick of hearing them. These artists have other good songs the station could be playing.
This really does a disservice to the bands I’d never heard of before and am interested in checking out because of a tune I heard on the station. I don’t want to buy a CD based on one tune I like, especially since they’re obviously going to pick the best song from the album. For example, they frequently play a song called “My Coco” by the band Stellastar. The song is somewhat quirky and catchy, but it’s already becoming irritating to me on repeated listenings – there’s a lot of repetition in the song. Nevertheless, based on that song, I really want to hear what some of their other songs from the album sound like, since it’s the kind of thing I might want to buy. (Don’t tell me to hunt down song samples on the Internet – that’s too much work to do that for every band I find myself interested in.) Would it really hurt the station to play one or two other tunes from the album?
It’s just odd to me that here they are playing these bands and songs that are pretty far away from the mainstream, and yet they’re still limiting themselves.
Latre.