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It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To

Today is my birthday! Honestly, I’ve never been much into birthdays and parties. Even now, if you ask me how old I am, I have to do math… What year is it now? 2013… so…

2013 – 1975 = 38

Really I make it more difficult. I know the decade, I’m on my 30’s. So, then I take the year (13) – 5 (the year in the 70’s) and add that to 30.

30 + (13 – 5) = 38

I’m sure I could also use lunar cycles, or division. Let’s see:

(the number of leap years between my 1975 and 2013) * 4 + (the number of years since the last leap year) = 38 (I hope)

Every year since I was about 16 I get the song “It’s my Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To” by Leslie Gore in my head. No idea why, but it got me thinking about how we can best listen to music. But… it’s my birthday, and I’m keeping this short.

Music Discovery (replacing the radio)

Slacker to find music. I loved Pandora for a while, but Slacker, with humans making stations, and even DJs on some stations, along with the ability to skip songs and favorite them, and even make a station based on an artist, and choose to hear all, some or little of that artist are jut incredible options that no one else offers. It’s what I use in the car and at work all day. I do pay $4 a month since I like listening to music offline on my phone, I like unlimited skips and I like their ABC News. The free version is fine for most people.

Specific Albums

If you have Windows 8, use Windows 8 Music. It has any dong you could ever want, the interface is excellent, and the ads are infrequent. If you want to skip ads, and listen on your Widows 8 Phone, it’s $100 a year (cheaper than Spotify or anyone else sine they’re $9 a month… do the math).
My choice before getting Widows 8 was Spotify. It’s free, you can listen to just about anything, and their apps are incredible. I had a bunch, some which showed lyrics as the song played, found playlists of others I could follow, and had a nice interface. It really is a great service, and I had been a subscriber for a year or so, paying the $9 a month. I left though since I mostly listen to music on my phone, and their Windows Phone 7 app was only okay, and they took months to make a Windows Phone 8 app that was identical to the old one. Also, to listen on the phone you have to pay the $9 per month.

Final Decision

My final music decision is that I pay $4 for Slacker for car ride and all day listening. I listen to new albums that come out in Windows 8 Music (Spotify stinks at showing you newly released albums you might like) for free. If I find n album I really like I buy it on Amazon (cheaper than anywhere) and use their Cloud player or download the album locally. This has the added benefit of supporting the musician and the publisher (a dubious benefit there), where streaming services, even paid, give almost nothing to the artist. This Visualization is excellent.

Through this post I’ve been listening to “It’s My Party” in Widows 8 Music.
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