This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.

[caption id=“attachment_7569” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]

For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.

Throughout the month of October I alternated between listening to newly acquired music (of which I had quite a bit) and a dynamic playlist that was weighted so that most of the music had auto-ratings above 90, less music above 75, and even less above 50. Any song that I listened to only once would fit in the third category. After that, if I skipped it just once it would fall out of the group. So it gave me a nice mix of music including forgotten favorites. Now that I’ve listened to a good chunk of my library since the last time the Amarok database was corrupted I may modify the playlist to include the caveat that it couldn’t have been played in the last x days. I’m not sure if I want to make the date large enough that I only hear songs once per quarter or my standard two week waiting period. Given how little time I have to listen to music nowadays I might go for the 90 days. I also spent some chunks of time listening to my music on random on Google Music. That’s completely random so I end up hearing some songs I didn’t even remember ever acquiring. A lot of my new music came from Jamendo when I got an email with the month’s most popular songs and I decided to do a search for ska. Although I really enjoy ska, I got into it rather late so I don’t have very much ska music. (Mostly just Five Iron Frenzy, Save Ferris, No Doubt, and the Orange County Supertones - who are an OK ska band - I mostly like their least ska songs)