Apple’s music players all have a feature called “Shuffle”, where it takes the music on your device (or in your iTunes library) and shuffles it randomly and then plays the tracks in that random order.
I have always thought this was the most moronic thing ever. Who wants to listen to a RANDOM song next?!? I wanna hear something in a similar vein!
So I laughed at the Shuffle feature, and thought it might be some fun once or twice for the sure seredipity of two songs getting placed back to back. (“Highway to Hell” followed by “Stairway to Heaven” would be an odd pairing musically speaking, but the titles next to each other do produce a chuckle.)
But today my opinion on Shuffle changed when I actually took a leap and tried it out.
I simply couldn’t think of what I wanted to listen to… I was desperate for music, but what music?!?
I have:
- 32 playlists
- 11 radio stations
- 19 queued podcasts
- and more than 22 days of music in my entire iTunes Library.
Everything from Motorhead to The Beatles to Funk to The Orbital to Calexico to Amanda Palmer to Movie Soundtracks to Serbian Turbo Folk to Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to Leo Kottke to several of my old bands… 120 genres in all.
So I hit the Shuffle button and let it just play anything it wanted in any order it wanted.
And that was when I realized that Shuffle is a brilliant tool if your record collection (whoops… did I just date myself?) consists of actually interesting shit, and not just Record Company Music.
If you have a wide variety of music the Shuffle feature doesn’t care about beat matching or genre freakouts (it just went from The Mermen to Bela Fleck & The Flecktones to Le Tigre to Betty Davis, for example). It just plays all the amazing music in your collection.
The key here is that by juxtaposing music randomly, you hear all of the music differently. When an extreme example like Modern Jazz Quartet’s “Bags Groove” is followed by Motorhead doing “God Save The Queen”, no matter how well you know them or how many times you have heard them before, both songs sound different. You hear different nuances you would never have picked up on otherwise. And - since I like both songs - hearing them back to back is not a problem because I like them both!
Now… if I could just tell it to “Grab those last 5 songs and make a playlist”, that could be a lot of fun for parties…
