Ever since our move back to Germany, I’ve taken to playing SongPop against random Germans I don’t know…
A couple of years ago, there was a hot new game on Facebook called Song Pop. Since I am a “music nerd”, I took to that game with a vengeance. In fact, I was such an enthusiastic player that I caught the attention of George Bounacos, owner of Pop Rock Nation. He realized I knew a lot about popular music and asked me to contribute to this blog. For awhile, George and I squared off regularly, wasting lots of time on the fast paced music identification game.
A demonstration of SongPop on YouTube.
Since 2012, most of my American Facebook friends have abandoned SongPop. I only have one actual Facebook friend who still plays regularly. Truth be told, I had kind of slacked off on the game myself, like I inevitably do with most games on Facebook. But then in August of this year, I found myself stuck in hotels and a temporary apartment, with not enough things to do to occupy my time. I picked up SongPop again, but I started issuing challenges to suggested opponents. Since I am now in Germany, my opponents, I presume, are all Deutschers!
It’s been interesting playing SongPop with these folks. For one thing, they are all uniformly really good at the game. It’s a challenge to beat them. In fact, one guy I’ve been playing goes by the name of Yotam. He lives in Berlin and regularly whips my ass at Song Pop. I have found only a few genres he doesn’t know well and he has found many more with which I am unfamiliar. He seems to really like dance music and I picture him as at least ten years younger than I am and big on the club scene. Given the nature of Song Pop and the fact that you only hear a few seconds of each song, it’s hard for me to get much better at the Trance, Electronic, and Hip Hop categories he seems to favor. On the other hand, I can’t deny that I have been exposed to some interesting new sounds. I will have to do some exploring soon.
There’s another guy named Thorsten I’ve been playing who lives in Vaihingen Enz, which I don’t think is that far from where I live now. He likes industrial music and 70s era punk. He’s not as hard to beat as Yotam is, but he is definitely a respectable Song Pop opponent. I feel good when I achieve a victory over Thorsten. So far, those two have stuck with me the longest.
For awhile, I was also playing “Adriane”, who knew her stuff when it came to modern country music. I’m not sure if she’s German or not, but based on some of the games we played, I suspect she is. And she was also challenging me to genres I have no clue about like Brazilian pop divas! But then, I am guilty of such gamesmanship, too. I’ve been known to challenge people with Christian rock, national anthems, and opera. I’m usually pleasantly surprised when it turns out they know about those categories!
I don’t know if Germans are uniformly tougher opponents in SongPop than Americans are, but I do know that the ones I’ve been playing have been as good or better than I am at the game. And I think, too, that the categories SongPop players choose say a lot about the type of people they are. If I were still academically inclined, I might even do a formal study on it. But as it is now, SongPop remains a fun way to pass all the free time I have.
