Why I left BuzzFe... er, I mean, why I got the fuck away from terrestrial radio

Baby Driver

This is the eighth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Named after a Simon & Garfunkel tune that's like a turtlenecked-and-khaki-pantsed precursor to Prince's "Little Red Corvette" ("I hit the road and I'm gone"), Baby Driver is Edgar Wright's wonderful antidote to superhero movie fatigue (the recent thrills of Wonder Woman aside), as well as a subtle rebuke to the often-afraid-of-idiosyncrasy superhero movie studio system that chewed the idiosyncratic Wright up and spat him out (back in 2014). Wright's caper flick is the inventively told, occasionally Kid Koala-scored story of a 20-something getaway driver known simply as Baby, whose method of drowning out the tinnitus he's suffered from since childhood is to continually play the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Bob & Earl in his omnipresent iPod earbuds, even during high-speed car chases. While mowing through truffle parmesan butter popcorn at a Baby Driver screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, I realized Wright basically made a movie about me.

Sure, I'm not a getaway driver and I can't parkour my way out of a tight spot like Baby astoundingly can at one point during Baby Driver, but at all hours in my apartment building, I always wear headphones full of music from my phone or my Mac, not to drown out tinnitus, but to drown out annoying footstep noises from my apartment's paper-thin ceiling. Atop the ceiling, it always sounds like two elephants fucking.

Baby Driver

Part of the challenge of writing these blog posts in the past nine years--and now, in addition to the posts, a prose novel manuscript--has been trying to concentrate while all these infuriating noises from my ceiling ensue. If it weren't for my headphones drowning those noises out, I don't think I could ever get any shit done in my apartment, and I don't think I could ever sleep at night either (for that, I switch off the music and put on in my headphones a copy of one of those eight-hour YouTube audio clips of starship white noise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I'm out cold like Riker after having to listen to Data's poetry slam).

The end of an era: Live365's demise means the demise of AFOS as a radio station after 13 intriguing years on the air

My very first blog post of 2016 was originally going to be either a piece about Electric Boogaloo, the Cannon Films documentary that's now streaming on Netflix, or a piece about Creed and why I like Ludwig Göransson's original score from that film so much that I'm adding the score to AFOS rotation. It was going to be a typically quiet and uneventful slide into the new year here at this blog, right? [Dana Carvey's John McLaughlin voice] Wrong! Live365, the Bay Area Internet radio hosting platform I've gotten along well with--it's the company that's powered AFOS for 13 years--ended 2015 with a huge announcement.

Recent changes in music licensing regulations and the end of the Webcaster Settlement Act, which allowed for low-revenue Internet radio stations to pay lower royalties to record labels than those paid by the likes of Pandora, have resulted in Live365's investors leaving the company and Live365 laying off nearly its entire staff. The company has already moved out of its longtime Foster City office space.

The future doesn't look good for Live365. The company informed its Pro broadcasters that it will allow them to continue running their radio stations until January 31. I'm one of Live365's Pro broadcasters, so that means, yes, unless Live365 is somehow saved by a new group of investors or it gets some other kind of 11th-hour rescue, AFOS is going off the air on January 31.

My response to that is this: good. It's time to call it quits as an Internet radio broadcaster.

I've seen a few Live365 Pro or non-Pro broadcasters tell their listeners that they either have started to look for other streaming platform options or have shut down their Live365 streams to begin streaming independently. I won't be doing the same for AFOS. Some of the enthusiasm I had during the first few years of running the station has simply disappeared. The audience for AFOS has also disappeared, although there are still one or two listeners who holler at me on Facebook or Twitter. Why listen to a 24-hour station when other platforms allow you to curate your own playlists with ease or when you can simply YouTube any piece of music you like? (I don't even listen to Internet stations anymore. I prefer to listen to DJ mixes. The Internet has changed so much since 2003 and 2004. Those years were when my listeners were at their most responsive and vocal, so I used to do hour-long shows where I would read aloud their e-mails to me. And then one day, the e-mails suddenly stopped coming, so without those e-mails, I stopped doing mailbag shows.)

I still listen to the film and TV score albums that my station's programming is comprised of, so I've continued to update the station playlists once or twice a month to attempt to keep the station from sounding stale. But I haven't talked into a microphone and recorded original content for AFOS since 2009. I got tired of not getting paid for speaking on the mic.

I never earned a dime from AFOS, much like how college radio DJs who currently host score music radio programs (just like I did when I was a university student) or any other kind of program don't get paid by their stations for spinning music. But I never intended to earn a dime from AFOS anyway. I did all this only because I like to stream score music and I'm passionate about the work of a few film composers, many of whom are prolific (Ennio Morricone), while others aren't as prolific and really ought to be prolific (like David Holmes or, from the rugged lands of Shaolin, RZA, who's better at film scoring than acting).

Thanks to AFOS shuffle mode, I wonder what a Batman sandwich or a Star Trek sandwich would taste like

Even though it can occasionally be a hassle to try to keep track of 17 hours and 28 minutes of music, which is the average amount of music I calculated from the current total track lengths of the eight different playlists I keep in rotation for the "AFOS Prime" block (plus the extra hours of music that make up the five other blocks on the AFOS station schedule), running AFOS is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

Often, weird things I have no control over take place during the shuffle mode I've set for AFOS, which is how I've regularly referred to the station since 2007. It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten the station name to just AFOS because the acronym evokes the four-call-letter names of the terrestrial radio stations I grew up listening to: KFRC, KMEL and so on. But instead of a K as the first letter, it's an A. Also, the acronym can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them. Examples include "Ample Focus on Scores," "All Fantastic Original Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit."

Anyway, shuffle mode causes all these fantastic original scores to form either unintentional sets of two or three tracks by the same composer or "sandwiches," which is how I refer to cases where two tracks written by the same composer or emanating from the same movie or TV franchise appear to be sandwiching a completely unrelated track in the "last played" section of the AFOS Live365 site. I often take screen shots of these accidental sets or sandwiches.

Star Trek sandwiches happen frequently on AFOS. Mmm, Star Trek sandwich. I wonder how a Star Trek sandwich would taste. Maybe it would be like Chief O'Brien's "Altair sandwich" with no mustard from Deep Space Nine. Some Star Trek head who can't spell has defined an Altair sandwich as "three kinds of meet [sic], two cheeses, and any number of other additions." Whattup, future Super Bowl Sunday dish.

Batman sandwiches also happen a lot on AFOS. I wonder what a Batman sandwich would taste like. I figure it would be like the Batman Diner Double Beef at McDonald's in Hong Kong.

(Photo source: Geekologie)

Hold up. An egg in a burger?! I hate eggs if they're not scrambled, and even though it's scrambled in this case, eggs don't belong in burgers. I'll pass.

Occasionally, there are spaghetti western sandwiches on "AFOS Prime." Is there such a thing as a spaghetti western sandwich? Apparently, there is. Somebody blogged about a spaghetti western sandwich shop in Rome. Some of its sandwiches are named after characters from Terence Hill and Bud Spencer's Trinity movies.

(Photo source: Afar)

Here are more screen shots of shuffle mode weirdness I previously collected in 2011, joined by some new and never-before-posted screen shots of more weird music sandwiches and combinations.

There have been unintentional time travel movie theme double shots.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from the first Thor flick.

AFOS converts to stereo this Saturday, December 1--if there are no technical difficulties

After 10 years of AFOS being in mono (22050 Hz, 32 kbps, "Good audio quality for talk radio. Not great for music," according to Live365, which powers AFOS), I'm upgrading AFOS to stereo (22050 Hz, 56 kbps, "Audio quality is the illest," according to me). Since October 1, I've been going through the AFOS music library and re-converting five or 10 "AFOS Prime" playlist tracks per day, this time into stereo mp3s instead of saving them down as mono mp3s like I used to do for 10 straight years.

The conversion to stereo was originally going to take place on January 1, but because I now have enough mp3s that won't result in too much repetition, I'm moving the upgrade up to Saturday. That means I have to temporarily shut down the station tomorrow to upload all those redone files to the station locker. Hopefully, there won't be any technical snafus in the next two days because I don't have the patience for that shit right now.

The slightly bigger file sizes will result in less music in the locker, but far superior sound quality. In other words, AFOS won't sound like an AM station anymore. I streamed content in mono only because mono file sizes are smaller, and that allowed me to stream a lot more music (according to Live365, four times more music than I'll be capable of streaming in stereo, to be exact).

I was playing back the new stereo mp3 I just made out of "Malcolm and Martin" from the Do the Right Thing score album, and the difference is huge. I like being able to hear Terence Blanchard's trumpet during "Malcolm and Martin" with the same clarity and resonance it has on the album.

The downsized amount of music in the locker also means huge schedule changes. The "AFOS Prime" block will remain on the schedule, but the other blocks--"Beat Box," "Rock Box," "Rome, Italian Style," "Chai Noon," "New Cue Revue" and "Soda and Pie"--will not be back. However, some tracks from the "Chai Noon" playlist will be transferred to "AFOS Prime," and I might bring back "Beat Box" and "Rock Box" to the schedule at some point next year as I gradually rebuild those two playlists. I took another look at the revamped "AFOS Prime" playlist, and it turns out I do have enough not-so-John-Williams-y tracks to rebuild "Beat Box," so "Beat Box" is back on the schedule with a new time slot: Mondays through Fridays at 7-9am.

Frankly, I always hated mono, from the way it makes music sound so tinny to its very name. Audio formats shouldn't have the same exact names as diseases you get from kissing.

Every day I'm shufflin'

Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

(*) It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.

Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from Thor.

Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...

... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)

Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!

"A Fistful of Soundtracks can be a blast to listen to. Duck, you sucka!"

We interrupt my work on a drawing of the three members of De La Soul for my currently-in-the-works, to-be-self-published book to bring you this special bulletin.

I don't know what Crutchfield is--the name sounds like a Syfy Original Movie(*) ripoff of Cloverfield--but I'd like to thank the site for a mostly positive review of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel that it posted a few weeks ago.

(*) Speaking of which, Battle of Los Angeles? Really, Syfy? Next time you run out of title ideas for your original movies, how about you take a cue from your own station tagline and imagine greater?

A mostly positive review of the Fistful of Soundtracks channel, posted by a Syfy Original Movie ripoff of Cloverfield

I've seen so many blogs with kind things to say about AFOS--and I always appreciate that--but they always get one or two tidbits about AFOS or me wrong. Crutchfield's review has none of that "every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer" bullshit. The reviewer actually did his homework and took the time to listen closely and note that "they aren't placed at random. If you hear the trailer for Big Trouble in Little China, you can be sure that the next selection will be from the soundtrack of that film." (However, for some odd reason, he never once uses the word "score" in his review to distinguish between "soundtrack" and "score.")

The reviewer wishes my channel had a better-quality bit rate and is probably wondering why it's just 32 kbps. Lengthy answer: I'm broke.

New Year's Day means changes to AFOS programming

I'm renaming one of the AFOS programming blocks. Starting January 3, "The F Zone," which focuses on "needle drops" (non-original songs during films like High Fidelity and the Harold & Kumar series and shows like Breaking Bad and Community), becomes "Rock Box." The time slots for "Rock Box" are 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

In November, I created a block called "New Cue Revue," which streams selections from new releases (or albums that aren't exactly new but are new to the "Assorted Fistful" playlist). It moves to Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm and Fridays at 11am-noon.

A new block called "The Street" will focus on my favorite kind of film or TV score album: the funky-sounding kind, the kind that gets frequently sampled by beatmakers. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, David Holmes and newcomer Adrian Younge will get tons of airplay here. "The Street" airs on Mondays at 6-9am and noon-3pm, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 6-9am and 1-4pm and Fridays at 7-9am and 1-3pm.

The listeners who evaluate my playlists' tracks on Live365.com tend to give low star ratings to the funkier or more soulful-sounding ones. Live365 has listeners rate tracks because the site thinks this helps its station programmers decide which tracks to keep and which ones to get rid of. Well, it doesn't help this station programmer because I don't care about those listeners' ratings anyway. Every time someone on Live365 gives a track one and a half stars, it makes me want to find ways to stream it more often.

Whenever I upload a new track to one of my playlists, I always have to block my eyes from the ratings to keep myself from getting pissed off at a negative one. What the hell are those listeners doing hanging around AFOS anyway? I bet they want another StreamingSoundtracks or another Permanent Waves. AFOS is a little different from them. It streams certain subgenres of film or TV score music that those stations tend to ignore.

"The Street" is my three-hour middle finger to those people who give one and a half stars to classic tracks like "Pusherman." On Fridays, the block is two hours because my middle finger will get tired by the end of the week.

AFOS: "Four-Star Playlist" tracks

Airing today at 10am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Four-Star Playlist" (WEB83) from January 1-7, 2007. Each track during WEB83 received at one time or another a four-star rating or higher from Live365.com listeners. I had a bad cold when I recorded WEB83. I sounded like Peter Brady.

The instrumental bed during WEB83's opening segment is "Who Got Da Props" by Black Moon.

1. Duran Duran, "A View to a Kill," The Best of James Bond: 30th Anniversary Limited Edition, EMI
2. James Horner, "Main Title," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, GNP/Crescendo
3. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "Vespertilio," Batman Begins, Warner Sunset/Warner Home Video
4. Ennio Morricone featuring Christy, "Deep Down" (from Danger: Diabolik), Canto Morricone: The Ennio Morricone Songbook, Vol. 1, Bear Family
5. 702, "Pootie Tangin'," Pootie Tang, Hollywood
6. Jerry Goldsmith, "Old Bagdad," The 13th Warrior, Varèse Sarabande
7. Bill Conti, "Going the Distance," Rocky, EMI
8. Michael Giacchino, "'Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall,'" Mission: Impossible III, Varèse Sarabande
9. Marilyn Manson, "Resident Evil Main Title Theme," Resident Evil, Roadrunner/UMG Soundtracks
10. Bear McCreary, "Battle on the Asteroid," Battlestar Galactica: Season One, La-La Land
11. Lyle Lanley & Cast, "The Monorail Song," The Simpsons: Songs in the Key of Springfield, Rhino
12. John Barry, "Gumbold's Safe," On Her Majesty's Secret Service, EMI/Capitol
13. Ennio Morricone, "Magic and Ecstasy" (from Exorcist II: The Heretic), A Fistful of Film Music: The Ennio Morricone Anthology, Rhino
14. BC Smith featuring Ulali, "Forgive Our Fathers Suite featuring Wahjeeleh-Yihm," Smoke Signals, TVT Soundtrax

Reruns of AFOS: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm. To listen to the station during either of those time slots (or right now), press the play icon on the blue widget below the "About me" mini-bio on this blog.

The reason why A Fistful of Soundtracks isn't in podcast form

Bryan Magan is the latest of several listeners who have asked me, "I'd like to have A Fistful of Soundtracks on my iPod, so what are the chances of turning it into a podcast?"

The chances are nil.

If A Fistful of Soundtracks were a podcast, I'd end up more broke than I already am. It costs less to run AFOS as a Live365 radio station than as a podcast, which is why I've never joined the podcastosphere, where, because of the kind of music I play, I'd have to deal with expensive music licensing fees and other legal issues.

It's illegal for podcasters to include copyrighted music on their shows, unless the label or copyright owner gives them clearance. And then comes my favorite part--the labels' hefty licensing fees. That's why a lot of podcasters who prefer to be law-abiding ones choose to do their podcasts as talk shows rather than music shows. Some of the more law-abiding podcasters who have music shows only use songs that are already cleared for podcast use, a.k.a. "podsafe."

If you want some AFOS on your iPod, use a streaming audio capture tool to record some of the stream, allowing you to be able to hear AFOS anytime, anywhere.

I've moved my blog from the chaos of MySpace...

... to Blogspot because MySpace doesn't allow you to post YouTube embeds. Also, nobody reads my blog. The only MySpacers who have lately left comments on my blog are annoying spammers. The kind of readers I want to attract are not found on MySpace, that's for sure.

If you're unfamiliar with A Fistful of Soundtracks, it's a Live365 channel that streams music from movies and TV and airs episodes of the long-running movie music radio program of the same name, which is hosted by me. The eps air Tuesdays and Thursdays at midnight, 2am, 4am, 6am, 10am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm, 7pm and 9pm and Wednesdays and Fridays at 7am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm and 9pm.

The channel also airs eps of Morning Becomes Dyspeptic, a 15-minute comedy album clip show that's been called "the morning show for people who are not morning people." MBD airs weekdays at 1am and 8am.

Most of my listeners access the station through the iTunes radio dial, where it's found under "Eclectic."

I hate to use the cliché "We live in uncertain times," but it applies to us Web radio broadcasters these days. I'm trying to come up with a plan B (audioblogging maybe?) in case the Internet radio crisis leaves Fistful without a home. As I've said on my official site, I've witnessed Internet radio's growth over the years, and now it's disheartening to see that this alternative form of radio that allowed Fistful to find its audience may die out, thanks to corporate greed.