Adult Contemporary Music - Old School Crap Lives On

I find it both interesting and disturbing that, for the most part, when out and about listening to the radio in the car, shops, etc, the general public pretty much listens to a body of work consisting of about 500-1000 or so songs (by my estimation). The majority of these songs were written 20-40 years ago (classic rock, 80's, disco, R&B). I'm talking about stuff like Lionel Richie, The Bee Gees, Madonna, and of course, Michael Jackson. Only songs have withstood the test of time as being "at least listenable".

My earliest memories of the Champlain Valley Fair are probably from about the ages of 6-10. That would put the years around early 1980's. I remember walking down the midway and by the rides, all blaring AC/DC, Def Leppard, Ozzie Osbourne, which at that time was only a few years old at the most. I went to the fair on Monday, and guess what? It's the same exact songs. It's like the whole thing is frozen in time.

The unfortunate part about this is, there are lots of new adult contemporary artists out there, but their music will probably never become part of this overplayed catalog. Not for lack of quality, but because it doesn't have the reputation of being "trustworthy". Places of business are generally not going to put any effort into their music selection, they just want to play stuff people recognize and accept.

Comments

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux. Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind. For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS. With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment. It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* f...

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks). It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc. But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin. To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...

Scamwagon

Search This Blog