The Blender Survey

A few days ago, I received an email from SiriusXM to participate in their periodic, "Music Blender Survey." What's that you say? Well, it's a survey that this particular station (which is the station they play at my job), where you can supposedly help "pick the music". They "want to know what you think of the music". I managed to figure out how to sign up for this ability to attempt at picking better music which at the time seemed a bit challenging. I recall on the main website being a slew of strange demographic type questions and an activation code that didn't seem to exist. I think they've made it easier since then. By following this link (which is from Facebook), you might be able to take the quiz.

Basically what the survey consists of are song samples and choices as to what your opinion of them are. I took a bunch of screen shots to show examples of this.

This goes one for all these songs: 

1. Best Day Of My Life - American Authors
2. Roar - Katy Perry
3. Uptown Funk - Bruno Mars
4. Story Of My Life - One Direction
5. I'm Not The Only One - Sam Smith 
6. Let Her Go - Passenger
7. Rude - Magic
8. Just Give Me A Reason - Pink + Nate Ruess (see post 1)
9. Brave - Sarah Bareilles
10. Superheroes - The Script
11. Headphones - Matt Nathanson
12. All About That Bass - Meghan Trainor
13. Come To Me - Goo Goo Dolls
14. Counting Stars - One Republic
15. Thinking Out Loud - Ed Sheeran
16. Try - Colbie Caillat
17. Angel In Blue Jeans - Train
18. Maps - Maroon 5
19. Stay With Me - Sam Smith
20. Daylight - Maroon 5
21. Jealous - Nick Jonas
22. Carry On - Fun.
23. Me And My Broken Heart - Rixton
24. Drive By - Train
25. The First - Villains
26. Demons - Imagine Dragons
27. Bartenders - Lady Antebellum
28. All Of Me - John Legend
29. Try - Pink
30. I Won't Give Up - Jason Mraz
31. Cool Kids - Echosmith
32. True Love - Pink
33. Say Something - A Great Big World
34. Am I Wrong - Nico And Vinz
35. Shake It Off - Taylor Swift
36. A Sky Full Of Stars - Coldplay
37. Night Changes - One Direction
38. I Choose You - Sara Bareilles

With the exception of just a couple, these are the songs that are repeated over throughout one of my 8 hours work days. Over time, I've noticed very little changes to the songs that they pick for this survey. Although, this past one did have a couple of newer ones, but still consisted of a few pesky songs that for some reason will not go away. Is this modern day payola? Are these songs' companies, labels, etc paying for these songs to be aired constantly? It just doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Do that many people actually like these terrible songs? Well, there's no accounting for taste among the general public. Even in this day and age where your own personal choices are so much more in reach than ever. You can listen past the radio format to find bands that you may have never heard otherwise. When I was younger, I had my older brother's interests to take as an influence on my own likes and dislikes when it came to music, movies etc. We listened to college radio, had pen pals mixtapes, independent magazines, etc. The internet just makes so much of the legwork in this almost nonexistent and much more accessible. So because of this, it boggles my mind as to why people still buy into garbage music such as what they play on "The Blend". BUT, there are a few folks out there who have a similar opinion to mine as to redundancy of this station.

 "The Blend"'s poor Facebook sap sometimes chimes in on the comments:

While others make some interesting songs requests:

Also in the survey, there are a few "fill in the blank" type questions. Here are some of my answers: 

 

In conclusion, I'm pretty certain the "become a music blender" program doesn't really change a whole lot. If you want to sign up for it, this is the link from their main website. If that doesn't work, try the Facebook one towards the top of this post.