“Hate That Tune”

So the other day my wife and I had to head out to pick up our cat Chaplin from the specialty vet (Chaplin has this thing where he periodically decides he doesn’t want to eat his food anymore, which is not something a young cat should be doing; we are still trying to figure out if there’s some physical cause for this or if he just wants to find out if we’re willing to spend as much money on cat vet bills as we are on dog vet bills*), and because it was low on gas, we took her car instead of mine so that we could fill the tank**. And that meant we got to listen to Spotify on her phone via CarPlay, as opposed to what we (used to) do when we (used to) go places in my car, which is listen to the music I have on my phone***. At first I had her play a few songs by a few artists I had recently discovered, but then I told her to just play whatever she wanted; and thus I discovered how my wife listens to Spotify:

Spotify: Plays a second or two of a song
Wife: Presses “Skip“
Spotify: Plays a second or two of a song
Wife: Presses “Skip“
Spotify: Plays a second or two of a song
Wife: Presses “Skip“
Me: “Do you always play Spotify like this?”
Wife: “Like what?”
Me: “You keep going on to the next song before the current song even gets started.”
Wife: “Not always. I also move it ahead and listen to the middle to see if it’ll be worth my time to get that far.”
Me: “Don’t you ever just listen to a song straight through?”
Wife: “Sometimes. I can tell pretty quickly if I’m going to like a song or not.”

And thus did I get the idea for a new television program:

Me: “We need to make a new game show called Hate That Tune. You could be on it and you could be like, ‘I can hate that tune in five notes or less’.”
Wife: “Oh, yeah. Especially if it’s a Fleetwood Mac cover.”

She also theorized a potentially lucrative career for herself:

Wife: “I bet I could also predict in five to ten seconds if a song is going to be in the top ten.”
Me: “Maybe you should offer your services to the record companies.”
Wife: “They should hire me, but they won’t.”

Incidentally, this little exchange led me to discover that Hate That Tune‘s namesake show, Name That Tune, is back on the air:

Now because on Name That Tune all the songs to be identified are played by an on-stage band, that means they are all cover versions. Which therefore would make the show, in fact, Hate That Tune, if my wife ever were to appear on it; she could hate that tune in zero notes, declare victory, and go home.

^* We are.
^** I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve had to fill the tank on either car since the start of the pandemic. In the past year, my lawn mower has probably used more gasoline than both cars combined.
^*** I don’t subscribe to a streaming service, because I don’t like the idea of all my music going away if I stop paying a monthly fee, but on the other hand, it means that I can’t just listen to whatever, whenever. This would be why my “New Artists” percentage is like one or two percent.