I'm not quite sure when it happened, but I stopped listening to the radio.
It probably happened when I stopped driving every day, which was really the only time I listened. But I distinctly remember a day of running errands when I noticed the same song playing when I went into the store as when I came back out. I love music, but it became obvious that radio stations were playing the same songs over and over.
My partner and I recently compared what we had on our phones. She’d never heard of most of the songs on mine. How was I choosing what to buy with my iTunes gift cards?
I hadn’t been paying attention. After looking at my list and giving it some thought, it became obvious: I bought music I heard in TV shows, commercials, and movies. It isn’t always easy to figure out the names of those songs or the artist, especially since only small segments of the song are usually played. The internet to the rescue!
Thanks to google and YouTube, nearly every song can be found eventually, but there is a bit of trial and error. Sometimes I find the song by looking at the music list for an episode of a TV show or googling a specific commercial. As long as I know the year the commercial aired, this works pretty well.
When I have only a line or two from the song, I have to listen to snippet after snippet on iTunes to find the one I want. I’ll give you an example. I heard a bit of a song on a video in YouTube. The only word I could remember when it came time to search for the song was “pray”. iTunes has pages of artists who have recorded songs called Pray--and I wasn’t even sure this was the main word! So, trial and error began as I listened to snippets of every song. I finally found it on a soundtrack from a movie I never saw. Sadly, this doesn’t work if the snippet is not the same as the one I heard and liked.
Another problem is it’s not always clear which versions of a song I want. For instance, do I want Toxic by Brittany Spears or the cast of Glee? I sometimes make mistakes. It turns out I wanted the Glee version but bought Brittany because Glee didn’t come up on my first search.
Of course, it is also a lovely way to procrastinate. I can justify it as work related: “It will go on my book’s playlist”.
Examples from commercials:
Under the Milky way by Sia
Glitter and Gold by Barns Courtney
From TV shows:
An Honest Man by Fantastic Negrito (Hand of God)
In the Shadows by Amy Stroup (Lucifer)
Multiple songs from Shadowhunters, WWE pay per views, Supernatural…
From Movies:
Pray from Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack
Everybody Knows from Suicide squad soundtrack
While I don’t have a lot of Top-10 songs, my phone has a great variety of music I love. What to hear some of them? Check them out on one of my Youtube playlists.
