Last week I was invited to help test some themed internet radio stations over the past few days. The focus was more on the overall customer experience rather than bug-hunting. But I’m a software testing professional as well as a music fan, so that’s going to have an effect on how I approach things.
Being a huge progressive rock fan, I was naturally driven towards their Prog channel. I listened to it for several hours while doing other work on the PC. Most of the music clearly fell into that genre, even when it was artists I’ve never heard of, and it was a good mix of classic 70s music and more contemporary artists. So far, so good, and the feedback I gave was positive.
But the odd track sounded completely out of place, dance-pop acts or singer-songwriters whose music fell well outside even the broadest possible definition of progressive rock. On further investigation, all of them turned out to be obscure European artists who shared names with better-known prog-rock acts whose own music wasn’t in their library. It’s the same artist disambiguation issue that plagues last.fm once you get beyond household names signed to major labels.
Nice to be able to combined skills learned as software tester with knowledge acquired as a music fan.