The arcade fires back

In this blog, I have meandered previously about the Genius function of iTunes and its apparent obsession with Arcade Fire. After months of watching it dutifully and predictably insert their songs into the playlist for just about any song I could think of, I decided today to do an experiment; this is sort of part of one of my day jobs (how obscure can I get?) and so it seemed a natural idea which, as with many ideas, mainly made me wonder why I hadn't thought of it earlier.

I would do what product development people refer to as reverse engineering; I would feed it an Arcade Fire song and see what happened. Perhaps I would confuse it; perhaps my PC would catch fire; perhaps Steve Jobs would knock on my door and ask me to stop. The excitement was almost unbearable as I started by selecting the sacrificial track to be fed to the gaping maw of the great dispersed cloud of electronic musical matchmaking that is Genius. As I have said before, what really gets to me about its incessant shoving of their songs under my nose and into my ears (I have really odd-shaped headphones) is that I am just not that big a fan; I can see the point, and sort of see what the fuss is about, but they just don't really touch or excite me on anything beyond a technical level. They are like modern art or classical music; I know I should appreciate them, and can see why others get excited, but the passion is just not there.

Anyway, I picked 'Ocean of noise', which I am slightly less unenthusiastic about than many of the others (talk about damning with faint praise...). The next earth-shatteringly important decision was whether to run Genius on my select iPod library (if 4760 songs can count as select) or on my PC library (closer to 10,000); the greater range and randomness of the latter, plus the fact that I could get 75 songs in the list (as opposed to 25 on the iPod - sample size really counts in proper research!) led me to run it on the PC, and I clicked on the icon with trembling fingers as sweat gently beaded my brow. Okay, not really. But I did regard the results with some mild interest, and looked again, and then arranged by artist for a clearer look, and got a surprise.

Genius did not sift through my collection in a very widespread way, but picked several tracks each off a very very small sample of the 1003 albums in my library, and showed a clear preference for those with DNL marked on their charts, as it were.

Let me explain the DNL concept. I have had a subscription for the eMusic site for around 2 years, which gives me 65 downloads a month, and some months I have got plenty of good stuff (new or old). In other months, though, I have (usually just before the roll-over date when I would lose my allowance) found nothing new or old which grabs me and, in mild panic, experimented with something I have heard of, but not heard. Inevitably, many of these, due to the overall pressure of new material being thrown at me, have ended up temporarily or permanently in the DNL (Downloaded, Never Listened) file. Of course, some DNL albums were loans from others or occasionally more mainstream purchases, but I reckon most came from eMusic.

Anyway, this is where Genius seemed to do much of its rummaging. DNL albums it proferred for my contemplation, like an eager dog holding up a dead fish, included:


Writer's Block - Peter, Bjorn and John (5 tracks)
Armchair apocrypha - Andrew Bird (4 tracks)
Ga Ga Ga Ga - Spoon (4 tracks)
Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys (4 tracks, maybe picking up a clue here - two words, first begins with 'Arc'?)
Jukebox - Cat Power (3 tracks)
Robbers and Cowards - Cold War Kids (2 tracks)
The Gulag Aorcestar - Beiruit (2 tracks)
Evil Urges - My Morning Jacket (2 tracks)
Icky Thump - the White Stripes (2 tracks)

On a more positive note which suggests either that it is getting to know me, or that Arcade Fire fans who run Genius have good taste, it included six tracks from the National's 'Boxer' (plus 'Secret meeting', 'All the wine' and 'Mr November' from 'Alligator'), as well as picking out Editor's 'An end has a start' (4 tracks), Wilco's 'Blue Sky Blue' (my least favourite of their albums, but represented by 4 tracks), TV on the Radio's 'Dear Science' (3 tracks), Kings of Leon's 'Because of the Times' (2 tracks), Mildlake's 'Trials of Van Occupanther' (3 tracks) and Fleet Foxes (2 tracks).

Random individual songs to fill out the list (surprisingly few) came from British Sea Power ('Do you like rock music?' - are they the British Arcade Fire or is it vice versa?), Calexico ('Cruel'), The Dodos ('Fools'), Franz Ferdinand ('Eleanor put your boots on'), Overkill River ('Lost coastlines'), the Shins ('Black wave' - maybe for the ocean link?), and Vampire Weekend ('I stand corrected' - perhaps a knowing wink from Genius or am I getting paranoid?).

And, of course, with a certain crushing inevitability, like death or taxes, the list included 7 songs by a certain Canadian band whose initials might just be A.F. (Arty F**kers?), and three tracks of an E.P. of theirs with a certain gentleman whose initials are D.B.

Before I finish this post, I have realised it could end up being completely vanilla, with nothing but text and, as I am trying to avoid this, I better include one video, and of course there is only one option here:

So, to conclude, what have I learned about Genius from my experiment? It is infinintely more loyal to albums more than to either tracks or artists, it is relatively conservative in that it does not cast its net too wide, and it is obsessed with getting me to listen to more than the 20% of my collection I almost exclusively take out for a spin; it is in turns a nerd trying to change my tastes by whining at me, a stalker rummaging through my wheelie bin, and a friend trying to drop hints and gently steer me to safer waters of musical taste. I'm just not sure its all that clever, that's all. Then again, it probably thinks I am pretty dumb too for paying for all those unheard albums!