Does serendipity sound better?

So as I tweeted a bit I recently discovered that when I bought my new car it came with Sirius satellite radio. I like many am familiar with it from a few cars I've rented over the years. There are aspects about it to like, I have yet to ever construct a playlist that captures the 90s, and evokes as much personal nostalgia, as "90s on 9."  I also enjoy being able to listen to BBC's Radio 1 as I did back when I was in college. There's also a decent rock station "Octane", bottom line I was able to fill the first 12 presets pretty easily. Also while there are a lot of factors in play the audio quality FAR surpasses anything I've ever managed to coax out of my iPhone. I can also use the steering wheel controls to cycle between presets which is pretty handy.

Question is do all of these things contribute to the adding of another bill to my life? I've always looked at satellite radio as just another bill when I have a 32GB iPhone worth of music at my disposal. I realized though that those two things aren't the same. There's the old adage that "free food tastes better." I wonder if music picked by someone else sounds different or feels different? I know that when a song comes up on "90s on 9" that I have a different reaction to it then if I were listening to it on my iPod. What is that all about?

I think it is the serendipity. Humans I think like that sense of not knowing, the sense (perceived or real) of discovery. If I put my iPod on even at the most minimal level I am making a choice that resulted in a particular song being played. Sure sometimes you want that but sometimes you just want to stumble across it. I believe this serendipity issue is something that personal media hasn't solved yet. For example there are times when even though I have full TV series archived on my media PC I will end up just channel surfing. I think maybe it's that the standard is higher when we choose to do something. Lots of times if I put a playlist on in the car I will end up skipping a number of songs I'm just not feeling at that point. Maybe it's just that I CAN skip. I'll end up looking at TV series I have archived and feeling like I'm not ready to invest right then. I suppose cynically we could say maybe it is just a desire for the mindlessness.

Whatever the psychological reasons for the phenomenon it has me wondering is maybe the investment in that bill might not be worth it? For a music fan I don't spend a lot of time 'discovering' music anymore. My iPod often stays locked on one of the same three playlists (even though I have several). Listening to new music is nice once and a while. Of course this could be a fail of my playlists as well, as evidenced by the fact that I recently found myself playing around with iTunes 'Genius' function more. 

So I'm not sure exactly what the answer is. Maybe it is that this is clearly something that people are thinking about since iTunes Genius and Google Music Instant Mix exist and maybe it's just that the computer driven solution hasn't beat the human one (program director)...with the usual caveat....yet.