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Living in a Material World

So I whored myself out to market research today. C_ does focus groups a lot, which involves giving your opinion on things in exchange for cash. She got called to do a music one today and they asked her if she knew anyone else who was interested so she handed the phone to me. They were doing programming research for a soft rock/r&b station (not that they said that, but the questions were very leading) and paying $50 for two hours. Okay, so what better things did I have to do (well, spend $10 on a kung fu flick). They played 672 snips of songs that you had to rate from Unfamilliar to Really Dislike to Favorite (with an extra spot for Tired Of which could be used no matter what rating you gave it). It really gave me an insite into why I stopped listening to commercial radio, as well as where my tastes lie. After about 200 songs, I started thinking of each in terms of, "is this better or worse than KC and the Sunshine Band?" Really fucking scary.

It was rather gratifying that I got to rate a whole bunch of Bee Gees songs as Really Dislike. And there was just way too much disco going on over all (Oh, and Mr. Wonder, if your screen reader is reading this off to you, you got top marks)

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