P.J. Vogt on Reply All’s “The Case of the Missing Hit” | Hacker News Reader

P.J. Vogt on Reply All’s “The Case of the Missing Hit”

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85 pointstintinnabula31 comments

If you hadn't heard this podcast episode [1] and happen to be reading the comments here before reading the article, I highly suggest you listen to it before going any further. This episode is one of the best podcast episodes I have ever heard and both the interview and a few of the comments here spoil some of the twists and turns of the story.

Here is one of the opening paragraphs of the article to give you a little spoiler free teaser:

>To recap: California filmmaker Tyler Gillett was hunting for a song that may or may not exist. The quest started after a holiday party, when he started singing a tune from memory to his wife. He swore it was a hit from the ’90s, some aesthetic mix of U2 and Barenaked Ladies. His wife had never heard of it before. Later, after hours falling down Google rabbit holes, he realizes the song can’t be found on the internet, the infinite repository of information where almost everything that’s ever existed can be found. It feels uncanny, like he’s found a hole in the universe. But the song continues to settle into his brain, an earworm that can’t be cured. Desperately seeking a solution, he reaches out to the Reply All team.

[1] - https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2h8bx

>Q: Do you have a theory on what’s going on?

> A: Not really....

I wasn't familiar with Reply All and only listened to this episode after it was mentioned in a comment here on HN about two weeks ago.

P.J. Vogt is selling himself short. It is a fantastic piece of investigation. The story unfolds beautifully. I had a smile on my face the entire way through. When they finally played the song at the end I grinned from ear to ear in delight.

What the hell isn't to love about it?

Reply All is a group of very talented storytellers working at the intersection of tech and society. I love everything they do and have been listening to PJ and Alex since before Reply All (before starting Reply All, they had a podcast called TL;DR that was a spinoff from WNYC's On the Media).

The stories they tell should be of interest to the HN crowd, I'd highly recommend everyone give them a try.

I don't have the link right now but the one where they track down a scam callcenter all the way to India is also pretty impressive

There's a special place in hell for the people who work at those fake call centers in India and take advantage of elderly people. They confused my 80-year-old dad, who is slowing down noticeably, about a year ago. Luckily he gave them his debit-card number, and Wells Fargo was great about canceling the charge, but it still involved a lot of time and anxiety. I hope whomever scammed my dad gets scammed himself, when he's older.

I loved the Missing Hit episode of Reply All and need to make a point of seeking out this podcast more. The only episodes I've heard, I've loved. There's another good one that must be at least a year old now about scammy products on Amazon.

Here it is! https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nh3wk

I've listened to Reply All since the beginning, and you are right, it definitely appeals to the HN crowd.

Also yes, yes, no is hilarious and sometimes even I learn stuff from those segments, because they go really deep on the memes.

I highly recommend Reply All.

One word of warning, they do sometimes get stuff wrong in ways that are frustrating as an expert. It's usually a minor error but one that feels very out of place. Sometimes it's a tech error, sometimes it's a story about a company where you actually know the founders.

So be prepared to accept that. They are however really receptive to feedback.

Do you know if TL;DR exists in RSS feed form so I can go listen to the old episodes in a podcast player?

Here is the URL from Apple’s directory but you can probably also find it somewhere on WNYC’s site.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tldr/id709617583

What happened to TL;DR? I had listened to it as a podcast, then they had some kind of scandal. They disappeared, and reappeared in a form I found less interesting. I stopped listening at that point, but it sounds as if it has come back. What happened?

In short, TLDR made an episode criticizing somebody without inviting that person to comment for the show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Wadhwa#Withdrawal_from_t... has links.

Initially, we had the idea that if we didn’t learn anything else interesting from this search, it could have been an opportunity to talk about the concept of the Metaverse. Tyler was actually taking that concept somewhat seriously, the idea that we had fallen in between two multiverses. We even reached out to a quantum physicist from Caltech to talk about it.

Now that would have been an episode to remember.

In all seriousness, it was a great episode. I wish they could have tracked down the guitarist from Trinidad and Tobago who also remembered the song and posted about it on an obscure guitar forum.

Lots of people are talking about songs from the analog/early digital era not making it to the streaming world. This is a big issue for a lot of the music I listen to, mostly indie stuff from the 80s and 90s, much of it from local scenes. Even if it made it to CD, the likelihood of indie labels or rights holders doing the required legal, bureaucratic, and technical steps to make the recordings available on Spotify, Apple Music, or other streaming services is slim.

I know one Boston-area band whose single major label album (from 1990) is on streaming services, but the earlier stuff from indie labels in the 1980s (including their best-known material) didn't make it.

One of the band members is now a lawyer, and I asked him why I couldn't get the band's songs from Apple Music. He indicated it would be a huge pain from the perspective of getting former members who don't get along to sign the paperwork, and questioned whether it would be worth it financially considering the paltry payouts offered by streaming services to artists (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/oct/31/b...).

>Trinidad and Tobago

I know this just something that happens but the same week I listened to this episode I watched the Seinfeld episode that they mention this place.

Couldn’t figure out why it sounded so familiar when I watched the episode until you mentioned it here.

I've listened to a number of Reply All Podcast stories and I must say, most of it, is really good stuff: I highly recommend it. Many of them seem to be like investigative journalism, but they do it on internet/social media related stuff.

Reply All is one of my top 3 pods. I can't remember when I was underwhelmed.

Others: Heavyweight. Stuff You Should Know. Radiolab. Criminal.

Clearly you haven't listened to the goo episode

I found that one pretty compelling to listen to, although it didn’t have the significance of their investigative pieces.

I need to listen to this podcast. Funny thing is that there is a guitar riff in the song that I would randomly have in my head and knew it was from something. But when I heard it in context of the song it was both familiar and foreign. Definitely heard the song in the 90s as a high school/college student. But I guess I am finally getting old enough now that memories are starting to fade.

I'm so glad to see this posted here. I've been listening to Reply All since the first episode and have developed a real fondness for the two hosts. They are incredibly talented storytellers with a great sense of humor. My absolute favorite of theirs was when they flew to India to track down a phone scammer. It was incredible.

A lot of stuff gets lost to time. My friends Dad had a huge record collection of Jazz. When CDs came out he started replacing them. He still had hundreds of records, and lamented "a lot of these aren't going to be re-issued". I'm assuming that there is a lot of music out there lost to time.

For a long time I used what.cd to find digital copies of most of my Dad's record collection of 60s-80s folk music. A few of them we even managed to ship to users to create high quality rips of. Sadly it got shut down and the replacements haven't caught up yet.

https://heavy.com/tech/2016/11/what-cd-shut-down-music-torre...

Certainly there is. In 2008 there was a fire that destroyed many of the master tapes for old recordings, this will no doubt prevent new releases or remasters of many old albums. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-m...

Interesting. what should be saved. Whats weird though is that all that music was sitting in a private archive. What are the chances someone would go through them.. The public can't discover them. So there they sit.

Part 6.

A skeptic might argue that this is as it should be. In the 140-odd years since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, countless recordings have been made under the auspices of record companies. To conserve anything close to all those recordings has proved impossible; it may not even be desirable. The caretaking of canonical material, the Bings and Billies and Nirvanas, must naturally take priority. To ask that the same level of attention be lavished on all music, including stuff that holds interest only for obscurantists, is to demand a preservation standard that prevails in no other area of culture. If the sole vestiges of thousands of old recordings are a few stray 45s lining the shelves of collectors — perhaps that’s not a cultural tragedy, perhaps that’s a commercial-art ecosystem functioning properly.

Perhaps. But history holds a counterargument. Many recordings were ignored for decades, only to be rediscovered and enshrined as Imperishable Art. The Velvet Underground were a commercial bust in the late 1960s and early ’70s but have proved to be one of the most influential groups in history. Then there’s Nick Drake, the English singer-songwriter who recorded three LPs of dreamy jazz-inflected folk between 1969 and 1972, before his death at age 26. During Drake’s lifetime, his albums sold modestly. A cult fan base developed following the release of a box set; in 1999, Drake’s song “Pink Moon” appeared in a Volkswagen commercial, and sales went through the roof. All three of Drake’s LPs were included in Rolling Stone magazine’s 2005 tally of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

I want to like this show, but it far too often devolves into the hosts giggling uncontrollably like a couple of schoolgirls.

It lacks the professionalism and respect for the listener's time and attention I've come to expect after listening to shows like This American Life for years.

I feel like the show would be boring without their casual laughter. It gives the show personality and keeps it from being stale. To each his own.

I'm not complaining about the general light-heartedness and casual laughter.

There are full on prolonged laughing fits about stuff the audience isn't even aware of. Like we're eavesdropping on kids experiencing a sugar high and giggling over an inside joke.

That becomes obnoxious real quick.

I've never been confused by what the hosts are laughing about listening to this show.

Maybe you have trouble with non-visual social cues?

In the spectrum of podcasts wherein the hosts insist on doing this kind of thing, Reply All keeps it to a tasteful minimum.

But I agree in general; podcast hosts need to learn that their inside jokes are not really funny or fun to a broader audience.

What a ridiculous criticism. Their inside jokes aren't inside between the two of them, they are inside WITH THE AUDIENCE.

Yes, that may make a new listener listening to an episode for the first time get less out of it than a long time listener.

But to the long time listeners, it is an absolutely delight, and it is exactly inside jokes and callbacks that breed loyal long term fanbases.

I quite like their on-air banter, and have only found it on a couple of their shows such as "Yes Yes No", or "Super Tech Support". Their other shows seems to be quite professional.

Depends on the episode. The investigative episodes have little to none of this.

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