Reply All goes on a wild scavenger hunt to find a song that might not exist

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/09/reply-all-goes-on-a-wild-scave.html

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After listening to a few of the Reply All podcasts, I wonder if the hosts ever follow up with the experts they consult to tell them the outcome and let them know “you couldn’t have been more wrong”? That seems to be my main takeaway.

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Who, the expert that said it was someone approached and then abandoned by a major label? The multiple experts that nailed the time period this all happened? Sure, one person said she thought it was a hybrid of several songs Gillett confabulated. Which is what I thought when I was listening, because of the rather disjointed composition Olson used, a mashup of U2, Barenaked Ladies, and other 90’s pop stuff. And several people assumed the song didn’t exist, which is a reasonable assumption for someone as deep in the music industry as several of them were, for a weird song that sounds like something someone made in their bedroom. Which it was.

If your main takeaway is that experts are often wrong when confronted with incomplete information, and that you should take every opportunity to let them know how wrong their educated guesses were, I think you’ve missed the point. This was an interesting episode about music, memory, obsession, and the horror and tragedy of the recording industry at its peak.

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This was a great episode, I was amazed at how good the guy’s memory was when they brought him into the studio. One thing they didn’t really mention was that this could have been a catch-and-kill, where a major label signs an artist similar to one they are promoting, with the intention of burying the newly signed artist. I saw tons of this in Chicago in the early 90s.

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That was an amazing listen. Thank you for pointing me to it.

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Could be a song from a movie soundtrack, could have been a popular film, though the song never hit the charts.

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Spoiler alert: it exists, and they find the artist.

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Great Listen:
Spoiler:

Having looked up the song, this has a very happy ending in that the song actually has a ton of YouTube views since the episode aired.

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