Yesterday I had a meeting right in the middle of my morning and so I couldn't go out on my usual morning bike ride. At this time of the year, it gets too hot to ride much past 11am and the roads are too crowded before 9am. Instead of riding outside I rode in my nice-cool basement.
To help keep boredom away and excitement levels up during my exercise routine, I listened to music. Sometimes I listen to Pandora and other times Spotify. I don't pay for either service and so I get the pleasure of listening to ads and I do my best to ignore them. Yesterday I had one ad catch my attention. It talked about trending content and if you listened to this particular podcast you would know about all the latest Internet content that everyone is following. That got me wondering if trending is a good thing or not.
I have a friend that I used to work with that despised trending content. He likened it to everyone being sheep and following each other around. He's not wrong as there is a lot to be said for individuality. Given the relative ease of selecting your own music content, shouldn't we all have highly specialized music playlists with only our favorite songs. There are a lot of popular songs that I just can't stand and none of them are on my playlists.
The flip side of individual content is that of discovery. How do you know if you should listen to a new song? A coworker of mine that does a lot of work in the music industry listens to a lot of different music just to make sure she doesn't miss something new that she might like. If you always listen to the same songs, they become routine and eventually like all the other pop music played on the radio that everyone has come to hate.
There are a few songs that come to mind when I think about trending music. The first time I heard "Shut Up and Dance" from Walk the Moon, I instantly liked it. I didn't need to hear it a million times. However without it trending, I wouldn't have ever heard it in the first place.
We live in a wonderful time where we can choose what music we listen to. We can do the same with movies, television shows, and YouTube videos. We are not constrained by being forced to watch or listen to that content on someone else's schedule because we can stream it at will. We also don't have to be influenced by what is popular. However we can let trending content help us decide if it is worthy of our time. Like I wrote, it is a wonderful time right now.
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