Not so smart now, are we?

When iTunes got updated and added the “Genius” function I was very skeptical in the beginning. When I tried it out I just assumed that the service would be incapable of providing me with a reasonable playlist based on the song I had chosen, but to my surprise, this was not the case. Genius actually kinda worked, of course the selection hasn’t always been completely flawless, but it usually selected songs and groups in the same genre and style as the song I had chosen.

So, Genius has become a tool I’ve gotten used to and frequently used, that some of the more obscure groups and songs are not available is a fact that I am reconciled with. However, yesterday I got a hankering to listen to some nice melodic electro-pop and selected one of my favorite obscure Swedish groups Daybehavior and their song “Superstar” fully expecting that genius might not work with that specific song, but it did.

However… The resulting playlist is an abomination! The picture is an actual screenshot of what the resulting playlist ended up as, a mix of some of the most embarrassing songs in my iTunes library, freely mixing Europe and “The Final Countdown” with Nirvana and “Take on me” by A-ha (I don’t even want to mention that I secretly kinda like T.A.T.U.). The only song that can be even thought to be remotely related to the Daybehavior song is the Depeche Mode song that turned up in the playlist. I have a pretty substantial iTunes library of over 10,000 songs, but this time Genius took a great song as a base and then reached down in the gutters of my collection and decided to put them all together in one nasty playlist.

No, I didn’t listen through the playlist, I gave up somewhere near Nirvana…