A few months ago when I had to rent a car, it had Sirius XM in it that worked. I have it in my previous Focus and current one but I never use it because it's really not much better than regular radio. Anyway, when using the Sirius XM, I settled on mostly listening to the 80s station. Why? It had the most stuff I could actually tolerate without wanting to change the channel.
With their decades channels they play a wide variety of stuff so like the 80s channel you might hear Springsteen, Michael Jackson, New Kids on the Block, Poison, and Flock of Seagulls all in one stretch. It's the same with the 70s, 90s, and 2000s channels where they play a broad spectrum. What I decided was the 80s spectrum was the most tolerable for me. With the 90s it would play a couple of good songs and then some hip-hop or rap or country. The same for the 2000s. And the 70s would play some crappy disco or something. Ugh.
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A few weeks after that I did a survey for WLLZ, the local "classic" rock station. I hadn't really listened to regular radio much because there weren't any stations I really liked after the adult alternative station in Windsor changed formats to something more kid-friendly. Mostly I just listened to books on my Kindle and MP3 CDs of albums I bought. The survey I took had me listen to a lot of different samples of music and rate them. There were a lot, but I got paid $4, so I guess it was OK for like a half-hour or so. Listening to all the samples, I liked a lot more than I didn't.
So when I got a "new" used car that didn't have any stations set, I turned WLLZ on and like the 80s channel on Sirius it doesn't always play stuff I love, but it plays more that I can tolerate than other stations. I suppose it helps that "classic" rock is basically through the 2000s now. And since they hired most of the WRIF DJs from 15 years ago it's pretty much like when I moved to Metro Detroit in the early 2000s and started listening to that station. Kind of like having a time machine.
Though really an app like Pandora is still better because you can customize it better. But I let my Pandora lapse because I don't have it in the car and I can't use it at work or anything anymore. If my car had that installed, I would probably sign back up for it.
Anyway, I'm just saying sometimes you have to pick your poison and maybe you won't like everything, but if there's enough that you do like then it's probably the best you can do. I'm sure there's some way to relate that to books. Or life in general.
3 comments:
We had Sirius when it first came out. Then they dropped the metal station so we dropped it. Now I just listen to what's on my phone. I'm surprised radio stations are still around since they are always hit or miss.
i recently found that 106.3 up here is now 90s/00s "rock and alternative". there's some good stuff and some songs i haven't heard for a very long time, some i've never heard before, and some that are trash. it's fun to re-discover a long-lost song, but they play too many ads and too much pearl jam for my taste lol
I sometimes turn on WLLZ or WCSX on the way home from work. They're pretty good but seem to play a lot of ads. There is this AM station 580 that plays really old songs that I haven't heard in years. Sometimes I like those. If only the reception was better.
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