Tag Archives: spotify

Of Spotify and audiobooks…

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I’ve finally given in and started using Spotify on a regular basis. In a perfect world, I’d still keep up my playlists in iTunes like in the old days, but I’ve grudgingly come to accept that letting the app play a larger role in what I listen to is more convenient… even if it still doesn’t quite grasp the peculiarities of my musical taste. 

In any case, one of the unexpected perks I’ve found with Spotify is having audio books available. More particularly, I should say that audio books are available sometimes, because listening to those is limited to 15 hours a month. That’s fine for some books, but diving into anything in the Game of Thrones family is a bit challenging. 

Like Spotify itself, I was absolutely prepared to hold out against audio books. That said, I’ve honestly come to enjoy them and spend as much time with a book humming along in the background as I do music or podcasts. That’s all well and good, except I keep finding myself running into Spotify’s somewhat inexplicable 15-hour cap… which is just a touch frustrating when you’re in the middle of a book. 

This all leads to an obvious decision point. I could simply wait and finish next month, using the time already included in my plan, I could ante up another or $12 for Spotify to give me an additional ten hours of book time, or I could just subscribe to yet another app to handle my audio book needs. None of those options feels great, so I expect it’s just a decision about what will feel like less of a pain in the ass.

Yes, I know there are free options through the local library. What I’ve found while looking into that is that most of the books I have teed up are waitlisted. So far, I’ve mostly been using audiobooks to revisit some old favorites that I don’t necessarily want to take the time to re-read in paper form. As parts of a series, I need them to be available in the proper order and when I’m ready for them. What I’ve seen so far from the library doesn’t fill me with great confidence their service will fill that bill. Maybe that would be less of an issue if my interests and use case shifts over time.

In any case, it feels increasingly likely that I’ll just throw more money at Spotify for the same reason I keep throwing money at Comcast. I like the idea of having my music, podcasts, and books bundled in one app the same way I appreciate the old-fashioned single point of entry for television that cable provides. I’m sure there’s a cheaper way t get there from here, but unless it’s also more convenient, I’m not sure it’s the real winner. 

My great leap forward…

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As is so often the case when technology makes a great leap forward, I’m late to the party.

Until a few weeks ago, there I was, happily curating various playlists in iTunes the same way I’d been doing since the second generation iPod came out. I know. I might as well be here confessing I was still using Winamp to whip the llama’s ass.

Anyway. I’d been doing it that way for so long it was dead easy simple and reliable. It probably helped that I was mostly listening to the same music that’s been on my playlists for 20 years with only the occasional infusions of currently popular stuff. It wasn’t as if these playlists demanded a lot of time.

Lately, though, I’ve been a bit enchanted with a couple of artists – several with extensive catalogs – and I wasn’t particularly eager to buy up a few hundred dollars’ worth of digital albums to round out my collection on iTunes. Here enters Spotify with its three months for free introductory offer. Almost as if the great marketers in the machine knew the issue I was having and were prepared instantly to offer a $10 a month solution to get me out of that particular jam.

I still think owning the media is the preferable mode of doing things. Going to just owning the digital copy from owning the physical disks was a big step for me. Signing with Spotify and suddenly not owning any of it at all was something of a quantum leap. I still don’t love the idea that content can disappear or be edited instantly, but for sheer convenience, the streaming world really is hard to beat.

I am, somewhat begrudgingly, a fan.

Joe who?

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Let me say up front that I wouldn’t recognize Joe Rogan if he happened to be sitting right next to me while I’m typing this. I don’t have any idea what his background is or why an apparently large number of people seem to listen to his podcast and believe whatever it is he says. I’m not even intrigued enough about him to bother doing the Google search that would inevitably provide me with that information. 

So, with my understanding that Joe is “some guy with a podcast,” let me dive in with some basic thoughts:

1. Celebrity =/= Knowledgeable. I don’t get my medical advice from Kylie Jenner or my financial advice from random TicTokers. I’m not at all sure why there seems to be a popular correlation between someone being well known and the need to give their opinion any more weight than that given to any other random stranger from the internet.

2. The “Lincoln” Principle. One of the quotes most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln (without, interestingly, any supporting contemporary evidence) is, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” If people, in mass, are fool enough to be taken in by whatever internet huckster happens to be popular in the moment, there’s really not much to be done to protect them from themselves. In this country, we’re generally free to be just as stupid as we want to be.

3. There is no “standard” standard for responding to bad behavior. Whoopi Goldberg got suspended by her parent corporation over making a decidedly ill-advised comment about the Holocaust. Joe Rogan, in contrast, is free to pump out buckets full of misinformation to an apparently gullible audience with little or no oversight or consequence from his corporate host. 

Is one worse than the other? That’s hard to say since what the standard of what constitutes bad behavior is nearly impossible to define in a way that’s universally acceptable.

I use to watch Fox News back when they were just the outlet that reported news from a right of center perspective. As their content shifted increasingly away from news towards commentary and hyper-partisan propaganda, I switched them off in favor of other news sources. I think, perhaps, our individual ability to choose is the real point here. None of us are under any personal obligation to watch or listen to content from any specific source. Expecting “big business” to protect our delicate eyes and ears from words and images we don’t personally agree with doesn’t feel like a solution that goes anywhere we’d really want to be by the time it’s finished.

The wild west of podcast, blogs, and electronic media overall has given us an embarrassing wealth of resources representing every political and social stripe. The catch is, this degree of choice means that every individual has to make a choice about what media they consume – and what sources they believe. We can collectively encourage listening or watching content into which some academic rigor has been put, but we can’t, in the end, fix stupid.