Not what I would call music.

[strredwolf]

So Fossil points me to some decent music... and I go over and find the source.

All 2800 tracks of mash-ups. 

If you believe in Surgeons' Law, 90% of them are crap.  And that is what I'm finding them out to be.

But, of course, I have a method to my madness of finding the goodies from the crap.  I'm using iTunes rating system, where you can give a 1-5 star rating.  I leave it blank for "needs to be rated," 2+ for keepers and 4+ goes on my iPhone (with some exceptions, of course).  1 star rated songs have only one purpose in (their short) life:  to be thrown into the trash can.

All songs start out at 1.  To get to 2 or above, they have to follow some minimal rules.  For instance...

• If the song starts out too slow, taking more than thirty seconds to get going, you're staying at 1 and I'm skipping you. There are a few exceptions to this, though... but 60% of the music I was going through was being trapped by this.  (I call this the "GET GOIN'! MOVE THAT GEAR UP!" rule; instrumentals that say they are get a pass)
  
  Likewise, songs with an "intro" before starting out to begin with only penalize themselves.  Learn how to edit your tunes, man! ("Standing around like a bloody idiot...")
  

• Conversely, if it starts right up into the first verse without laying down the underlying beats, it also sticks at 1.  What are you, Dragonball Z opera?
• If the music doesn't flow smoothly, constantly starts and stutters, is high-end clipped (popping the speakers), it sticks at 1. ("BONK!")
  
• If the singing is best done at a poetry recital in a smoky bar on stage, it sticks at 1.  Most rap and hip-hop gets trapped by this.
• If the music and vocals are badly mixed, it also sticks at 1.  ("SPEAK UP, SONNY! I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU!")
• If the vocals are in a foreign language, it sticks at 1 unless there's a good reason. ("DO THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN WHAT?")

I'm tempted to add a "You have a history of making crap" rule, catching: Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Kelis, Kayane West, Beastie Boys, Destiny's Child, etc. Alot of rappers and hip-hop artists showing a pattern.  I took an initial swipe at the crap that was surfacing at the top, and cut the list down to 1467 unrated out of 1980, with another 380 on the chopping block.

For now, I'm keeping the 1's that don't show a pattern until I'm done the whole list.  I'll probably do another purge like this after another five days of ratings.

Comments

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

I'm always conflicted about how to use those ratings, because I think - if I rate this one star, why the hell is it even on my hard drive?

Usually the answer is "because I like having complete albums," but still, I resent the distortion of the rating system.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

I rate them one star for future deletions. I rate 'em 2 for having complete albums.

[kazriko.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of music to sift through. I grab only 30 tracks a month off Emusic and that's pretty much all the music I insert into my collection. It takes something phenomenally bad to make me take it out of the list once it goes in. There have been bands where their whole CD starts to get tiresome after 5 listens, like Muse. I usually listen to the 30 second clips of maybe 90-100 songs before picking my 2-3 albums for the month.

Much of the music I listen to would violate your "music and vocals badly mixed" because I've always enjoyed muddy sounding tracks. I blame Smashing Pumpkins for that. Most recently, "The Pains of Being Pure at Heart" has been my Muddy Vocals band to listen to.

So, do you use Last.FM?

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

These weren't muddy. These were disjointed. If the vocals didn't hit the beat the underlining tracks were providing, it makes me wonder who edited the track.

I don't use Last.FM, actually. How good is it?