Friday, November 03, 2006

Google Music Trends Rocks, World Musical Taste Sucks.

I thought that google music trends page, a page showing a weekly top listing of songs being listened to by gtalk users the world round, was one of the coolest apps in the world until i looked at it. After looking at the quite naturaly bland offerings on the "all genres, all countries" page I decided to head over to something really more up my alley, say, the all country listing for electronica. here's what i saw:

Rank

Title

Artist

Change

1

Maneater

Nelly Furtado

--

2

Always Something Better (Trentemøller Remix) [B... - Web Search

Trentemøller

1+1

3

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Daft Punk

-1-1

4

Natural Blues

Moby

3+3

5

Porcelain

Moby

1+1

6

One More Time

Daft Punk

-2-2

7

Galvanize

The Chemical Brothers

3+3

8

Aerodynamic

Daft Punk

-3-3

9

Hide and Seek

Imogen Heap

-1-1

10

Digital Love

Daft Punk

-1-1

11

Extreme Ways

Moby

5+5

12

The Rockafeller Skank

Fatboy Slim

--

13

Lift Me Up

Moby

New!

14

Strict Machine

Goldfrapp

New!

15

Around the World

Daft Punk

-1-1

16

Ooh La La

Goldfrapp

New!

17

Venus

Air

New!

18

Honey

Moby

New!

19

Short Circuit

Daft Punk

-1-1

20

Cherry Blossom Girl

Air

New!


Can I reprint that? guess I can since it was so very easy to do. copyright infringement shouldn't be that kind ov easy. I apologise for any disorientation, confusion, retching or nausea induced by reading the list above. I promise that i had nothing to do with this list being the way it is, but I'll get to that later first, I have to say this:


Nelly Fucking Furtado? MOBY? Daft Punk? TEN MOTHERFUCKING YEAR OLD FATBOY MOTHERFUCKING SLIM? MUSIC LOVERS OF THE WORLD, WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM?

I'm sorry about that little outburst it's just that when I look and see that the most marginal artist ever to grace my ears are at the top ov the electronica list It Just Makes Me Go Kinda Stupid In The HeaD, AnD - sorry.


But it's not like I'm blameless. When I got over my initial bafflement and sickened yet impotent rage I looked around for how they got these statistics that created so much wonder within me. It's all from people who:

a) use gtalk.
b) have their message to the world set to 'show current music track'
c) have 'share music listening history with Google Music Trends' selected in the Audio section of their settings.


well, one outta three ain't bad. I loves me some gtalk. Love love loves it, but I'm so very used to displaying little things I think of that are clever in my Lil' message window that I almost never want people to know what I'm listening to instead. I figure they don't really care anyway. but now I DOcare, oh yes indeedy, I care a great deal for what will seem like a very long while in this tangent-prone brain ov mine. I've gone into my gtalk and made the proper arrangements for me to share my musical tastes with the world in the hopes that just one song out of twenty on their list of the most popular will not suck.


And I Urge all of you to do the same. Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends of the Internet and all it Surveys, Lovers of Fine Electronic Music in its Myriad ov Forms, I Implore You! Go to Your Windows Machines (gtalk doesn't work on macs AFIK) throw open your Settings, and Strike a Blow for Taste! Share your Knowledge with the benighted and let them see the Light!

Overall, I blame the French for this list. I haven't actually done any research into the French portion of the electronica listing, but here's how I figure it: while most French techno is only marginally prefferable to suicide, Daft Punk has the ability to slap together a good beat or two once in a while. To the French this makes them musical gods akin to Beethoven for the Germans or Anne Murray for the Canadians. And let's face it, if you think Daft Punk is good then you've just to love premodern-trendsetter Moby and his dated antics.



The rain should stop in a few days, and then I can go outside.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Air is french, and they don't suck. but then again, they're not techno. "Electronic" is such a giant catchall. I wonder if i leave my gtalk set to "currentmusic" then leave my itunes on pause for like 10 days - would that cause a blip on their radar?
Cause then I could convince google that third eye foundation or something equally difficult was popular.

Anonymous said...

Ummm....are you aware that gtalk stores your conversations on Google's servers? On one hand, it's nice because when you search your email it searches your gtalk conversations too. On the other hand, well, they're storing your conversations on their servers.

Scott Yockey Jones said...

that truly is too too true that that is truly the thing that they do do, but i find it a mixed blessing. i like being able to search my conversations and use my chats as an indexed and dated notepad. anyway, if there's one corporation i'd choose to run the globe it'd be google.