I had something kinda strange happen yesterday, and now I’m trying to decide whether I’m the victim of a mere happy accident, or a spooky invasion of my entertainment privacy.
I’m in the car, and I know I’m going to be driving for a while, so I plug my iPhone in to my audio system to keep me company. A creature of habit, I immediately tune in to my most played playlist (which is becoming so stupidly large at this point, that I should stop calling it an actual “playlist” and just refer to it as my entire iTunes library — but I digress) when what to my wandering eyes did appear, BUT A SONG I HAVE NEVER HEARD, DOWNLOADED, NOR EVEN REMOTELY RECOGNIZED FROM ANYTHING I HEAR REGULARLY ON THE RADIO.
Weird, right? It was like this mystery song was trying to be all incognito, slipping itself in between the Goo Goo Dolls “Rebel Beat” and Blake Shelton’s “Mine Would Be You”.
So, I’m staring at it on the dashboard screen (with one eye, of course, driving with the other) asking myself, “What is that? Who sings it? How did that get there?” Naturally, I pressed play and, turns out, it’s a beautiful song! I actually love it (and for the inquiring minds reading this, the song is called “Endlessly” by a group called Green River Ordinance). I have since played it 179 times, but still I can’t figure out how it landed in my playlist.
Now that I’ve spent an entire day needlessly obsessing over this close encounter of the melodic kind, I’ve narrowed the scientific possibilities down to three, and they are: It really is just a happy accident – perhaps a “butt dial” while in the iTunes store resulting in the acquisition of said mystery song and its being subsequently plopped in my favorite playlist.
Or, choice “B” — Apple has teamed up with the Obama administration to totally invade my privacy as a shameless, uncomfortably big-brother-ish marketing ploy, thereby depositing a free song in my most played playlist with the hope that I would love it (I do) and be drawn to check out (and buy) the rest of the album (which will probably happen, so if it is indeed this “door”, it’s sneaky, but highly effective!)
Or, choice three, there is life on other planets who like to mess with people’s iPods for fun, and they are right now floating around the cosmos laughing their mis-shapen, fluorescent, flesh-less alien asses off at me.
I guess I should just let it go, enjoy the “free” gift of song, and take some comfort in the fact that, if there is life on other planets, at least they have a good taste in music