It's All About the Benjamins

Jump to Comments Oh man, everybody was ooh-ing and aah-ing on the twitface when iTunes 9 came out. Genius, the automatic mixtape maker, was apparently no longer a neat idea with a crummy implementation.

Well, I tell you what, when I wasn’t cajoling iTunes 8 to decrypt the DRM on songs I had legally bought in the early days of iTMS, I tried using Genius. It wasn’t that great, but I got it to spit out a couple of playlists that were eminently listenable, and a few more that are pretty good for the first ten tracks or so, and then take a nose-dive.

As you can tell by the title, I’m not exactly impressed by the iTunes 9 Genius. When it comes to the seeded genius mixes, where I choose one song and it chooses 49 songs to go with it, iTunes is no longer able to differentiate between me seeding it a song with Leslie Feist and maybe a piano or a guitar, and a song with Leslie Feist and a whole bunch of noisy, noisy electronic remix noises. iTunes 8 knew better than to put Chicago [Acoustic] after My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Classic Remix). No, when it put Chicago and a Feist track next to each other, it freakin’ knew to put Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder Version) next to Mushaboom (Postal Service Mix). When I want one otherwise gentle, lyric-prominent song that has been remixed into an noisy electronic dance number, I want the rest like that too dangit.

Further, iTunes 9’s entirely new feature, ‘genius mixes’, which creates new playlists without any input on the first, or ‘seed’, song, is utter garbage. This is not necessarily a fault of the Genius Mix concept itself, but, rather, that iTunes tags about half of the total inventory of music in its library as “Alternative and Punk.” Radiohead? Alternative and Punk. John Mayer? Alternative and Punk. The Decemberists? Alternative and Punk. Feist? Alternative and Punk.

Okay, okay, I get it. I’m just supposed to suck it up and take “Alternative and Punk” to mean “New Music.” But now wait just a hot second (as Patrick Bateman might say). I sure as something don’t have any punk music on my computer. The Clash, Minor Threat, Flogging Molly, Dropkick Murphys – that’s punk music. Nothing wrong with it, but it has precisely nothing to do sonically Regina Spektor or Maroon 5. Maroon 5! Alternative and Punk!

But what really gets me is of all 4 “Alternative and Punk” playlists, the one playlist that actually contains The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer – essentially the two bands that are the definition of 1990s Alternative music – is, get this, “Rock Mix 4.” Rock. Mix. And this is the issue, I can’t just go through a bulk rechristen all of the “Alternative and Punk” stuff as “indie rock” or “whatever wikipedia thinks ‘folk music’ means”, because I actually have some Alt music. Head-explode.

Also just wanted to point out one of the rock mix slots is taken up by both what I have specifically gone through and re-genred as both “comedy music” (Wierd Al, Spinal Tap) and stand up comedian CDs (Demitri Martin, Dane Cook – oh don’t give me that look for having him on my computer. Admit it, back in 2004 you thought he was funny, too.¹ I just never delete anything. Ever.) Don’t let the fact that I put my own genre labels on music that you mistagged get you down, iTunes 9 Genius Mix. You can still call it rock music. Whatever.

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1. “I got home from work today, and I took, like, a hundred-hour nap.” »”No you did not! You’d be very sick if you’re taking hundred-hour naps. That’s a coma! Say you took a coma after work, and I can follow the story. ‘I took a coma.’ ‘Hundred hours?’ ‘Hundred hours, was it about a hundred hours, yeah.’ ‘That’s a great coma!’ “