A truly eye-opening video showing how to take one moderately attractive, utterly untalented girl and quite literally construct a possible pop star. Soon we won’t need humans at all, if we do even now. My faith in true talents like Britney Spears and Nick Lachey is being sorely, sorely tested.

I’m not musically experimental. I’m not experimental at all, really. I read the same authors over and over, I listen to the same music, I eat the same food. It takes significant effort and will for me to admit another source into the mix. Call me a creature of habit, call me staid, call me boring… that’s just the way I roll.

So why do I find Pandora so compelling? A spin-off of the Music Genome Project, Pandora aims to introduce the listener to new music he might enjoy. Yeah. Everyone says that. Rhapsody, which I have lavished attention and money at for years, does something similar with their “Radio Station” concept. However, Pandora leverages the Music Genome Project’s music characterization and classification system to truly attempt to deliver something you really might enjoy rather than simply jam artists into the queue based on genre.

For instance, I have a station based on a number of bands, from Metallica to Joe Satriani. Given the types of music it will play other things similar. And by “similar” it gets pretty interesting. For instance, it chose to play “The Disintegrators” by Megadeth. Why? I asked it.

We’re playing this track because it features a subtle use of vocal harmony, extensive vamping, a vocal-centric aesthetic, minor key tonality, and a dirty electric guitar solo.

You can add particular songs you like to the station’s database of preferences. Based on that individual song’s characteristics, you’ll hear more like it. You can fine tune the selections by giving thumbs up and thumbs down for songs played. If you hate something, thumbs down on it and it’ll be skipped and the station will be adjusted to avoid similar things in the future.

I haven’t found any real keepers so far, but the chaff to wheat ratio is running pretty high. All this and it’s free. CF likes free.

I’ve mentioned time and time again that I subscribe to Rhapsody’s music service. At this point you could logically conclude that I’m a corporate shill and skip everything I ever say again if you haven’t already. I honestly wish I was a corporate shill so I could at least get my service for free if nothing else. I’m still very satisfied with the service for the uses that I put it through, namely listening to music at work and streaming it through my 360 at home. My library has grown from around 600 songs about 8 months ago to 3,400 songs today. I could theoretically go about 11 days without hearing the same song over again if the shuffle function was perfect.

I’ve actually gotten quite liberal with my playlist, simply throwing whole catalogs of music in from diverse artists as I go along. Why not? Technically I could put their entire damned collection on there and listen to it all, it doesn’t cost me any more. That, to me, is the value of this business model over the piecemeal method espoused by their competitors.

I did say almost perfect

If there’s a fly in the ointment it’s with Rhapsody’s player and it’s sensitivity to Internet connections. My work connection is flaky at best, and Rhapsody loses connection with the server roughly a dozen times a day. If I’m streaming music when it happens, I ain’t any more which requires human intervention to fix. I don’t like that.

Luckily, Rhapsody relatively recently added a feature whereby you can download protected version of songs rather than stream it. Costs hard drive space, but sure saves your ass when the connection goes down. Unfortunately, not every title is available for download. Out of the 3662 total tracks I have in my library, 278 aren’t available for download. For me this means that they don’t get played. Because if I hit one of those streaming songs when there’s a connection problem, I’m left with silence that I have to take an action to correct, and I don’t like taking action when I’m working. So, my playlist consists of things I can download.

If they could clear up the reliability of the streaming — or at least the recovery, maybe skipping streamed songs if there’s a network problem — they’d have a near perfect product.

I love music. My 2-year-old daughter loves music, dancing with naive, precious abandon to almost anything we throw at her (personally, I think she’s going to be a drummer as every single drum break in any song causes an ecstasy of butt-wiggling and head-nodding). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dark side. I have stared into the face of evil and grimaced.

“Come a little closer…”

As I walked — okay, limped — out of Java Jive this morning I heard a noise up by the street, a sort of tuneless soliloquy loudly vocalized. As I got to my car I caught a glimpse of the source between the trees. I stood mute as a roughly 6′3″, 300 pound, moderately beefy 30-something sweaty male in silver shorts and white tank top power-walked past, vigorously chanting the lines from the song he was listening to on his portable player. Even that sight, as disturbing as it was, wasn’t the worst part. No, the true evil was revealed as the song choice: some of the foulest, most blatant bubble gum pop horseshit you could imagine. I remembered some of the key words and looked it up. Prepare… Aaron Carter’s “Baby It’s You” as performed by sweaty man. Oh the sweet strains!

Baby it’s you that I want

So come a little closer

And don’t get me wrong

I’m kinda shy, but I know what I want

I’m waiting for you

So baby let’s get it on

This is what Rhapsody has to say about Mr. Carter:

Carter is about Michael Jackson’s age when the latter was in the Jackson Five; this is not to say that you’ll be hearing any type of “Ben” emerge from this cute-as-a-Hanson boy’s lips. Covering Dance Pop tunes made popular by outfits such as the Jets (”Crush on You”), Carter shows off his boyhood charm, high voice, and playful demeanor.

Hold me.

How could Muzak be any worse?

My workplace has muzak in the halls. And cafeteria. And lobby. And bathrooms. It’s the insipid kind that’s piped in from space directly from a far planet harboring a race of malevolent lemur-analogue musicians whose only exports are muzak and suffering. That’s bad.

What’s worse is that the planet is having some political problems. This manifests itself on Earth and in my building in particular by the ordinarily horrid muzak selections being replaced by the same 158 seconds — I counted — of energy-sapping crap repeated forever and ever, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. I could reproduce each soul-draining note perfectly on their native instruments at this point, bleeding from every part of my body the whole time.

The funny/sad/scary part is this started happening a few months ago. Then “they” turned off the muzak and I figured someone finally noticed that “hey, morale is down and people are ripping each others’ throats out with staple removers… must be the endlessly repeating muzak!” That it’s back on in the same state proves to me that fell trolls really do run the facilities department in this building and they feed on the corpses of the ones who just can’t take it anymore. They’d lost their meal ticket and now meat is back on the menu.

Hold me.

Though I typically eschew the wiles of “memes” and especially chain letters, the musical baton seems like harmless fun and I was looking for something to write about anyway. Well, aside from my seemingly endless stream of love for the Xbox 360. So it’s either gush about my daughter some more — which, it must be said, is tempting and may still exit my yapper sometime today — or tell everyone about my music habits. Lucky you!

Capacity?

This is a bit of a tough question. I have an MP3 player if you want to call it that — it’s my Sony Clie — but I use it only when I work out and it has a grand total of 64M of memory stick provided memory. Therefore, that’s certainly not my main music source. As should be obvious to anyone that reads this blog with any regularity, I’m a Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber and have been for well over two years. I use Rhapsody in two very different ways: to stream music at work and at home mostly as a reference to play along with on guitar. It is perfectly suited for that purpose. Therefore, a better measure for my usage is the number of tracks in my songlist which currently stands at 582 or 1.9 days of music as Rhapsody currently calculates it. Note, however, that I add to and subtract from this list on an almost daily basis (for instance, I just added Foo Fighters There’s Nothing Left To Lose album as I was typing this).

What was the last CD you bought?

One Day Remains from Alter Bridge.

So what do you have playing right now?

Right this very second “Just Look Up” from Joe Satriani’s Is There Love In Space?.

Tell me 5 songs you listen to a lot.

Another tough one as I generally listen to a random playlist. So, perhaps I’ll just list some representative songs that I dig more than most. So, in no particular order:

“Rumble Fish” by Sevendust

“Somewhere Over The Rainbow / What A Wonderful World” by Israel Kamakawiwo`ole

“I Don’t Believe In Love” by Queensryche

“Disposable Heroes” by Metallica

“Landslide” by Dixie Chicks

To what 5 people did you pass this baton?

Erm, I didn’t. Someone will have to steal it from here or it dies.