I thought of doing this over six months ago but still haven't. This unreasonable delay annoyed me no end and I thought of writing about this playlist creator's block two months ago. And it is today that I got to finish the less demanding of these tasks.
Believe me, creating this playlist is important for me. The airplay on radio channels is disappointing at best, and soul-crushingly repetitive at worst. There are four to five songs that have constituted 75% of the music I have heard on these channels in the past two months. However, music is only a very small part of what plays on the radio. Mostly, there is a bevy of builders who want me to buy a house in their complex, and a bee-line of online grocery providers who want to ensure I never need to step out of it. RJs spend most of their time cracking bad jokes, doing impressions or pranking people. Basically, RJ wale babu does everything but play mera gaana.
And it's not like I require a million songs. I drive for roughly an hour a day. Accounting for the fact that I would mostly not listen to the entire song, average song length is ~3 mins. It would suffice to have, say, 3 days' inventory of non-repeating stuff which makes 20 songs/ day X 3 = 60. I'll be extremely indulgent and tailor full size lists for sombre, calm, upbeat, party moods - totalling to 240 (60 X 4) - and replicate these for both English and Hindi racking up 480 songs.
Well, damn, that's quite a bit. But manageable.
The problem, however, put succinctly, is that I want this to be the 'Perfect Playlist'. And a perfect playlist eludes perfectly.
I am the kind of person who will laud the great BB King one minute, and let Britney be my sweet little angel the next. Hold it against me, if you will. November rain reminds me that blue hai paani paani. And my usual retort to 'Don't turn off the lights' is battiyaan bujha do ke neend nahi aati hai. I am usually at a loss when someone asks me what "genre/ kind" of music do I like. I like some songs for their music, some for their poignant lyrics, some for the sheer energy they bring, and a number of them because they remind me of a phase of life gone by.
Add to this the factor of my 'current mood' and making sure the song I would want to listen to at any particular instant is in the playlist becomes nigh impossible. For one, if I were to keep a buffer for those one-off song cravings, I would be exposing myself to the judgement of any co-passenger on the kind of trash that I listen to. Secondly, the existence of a lot of music urges is unknown to you till they actually surface. One would never recall Suchitra Krishnamurthy crooning 'Dole Dole' till one fine day you actually feel like drowning yourself in a bucket full of the 90s. And you have to have the feels to remember why Lobo singing 'I'd love you to want me' appealed so much to you.
Pondering over this makes me realize why gifting someone a mix-tape was such a thing especially in the Hollywood movies from a decade or two back (handing someone a flash drive just doesn't carry that kind of romance, perhaps). Considering how difficult it is to put a finger on one's own choices, it is truly remarkable to have figured out someone else's with even a fair bit of accuracy.
Anyone reading about this quandary might think that the plenty of music apps out there are a fix to this problem. Indeed, to a certain extent. However, the delight of the music player surprising you by playing the song you wanted, almost before you even knew you wanted to listen to it, is unmatched. Technology is magnificently close to bringing out systems like these.
I'll probably be asking for the RJ-like randomness and the human-touch that day. Human nature, innit?
