ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
My open letter to Stingray Music
Okay, for those of you who know me, you will know that music is a very important part of my life. And Yes, I do feel it important to use my STB as a great way to transport music to my living areas.
1. Yes, I know I am probably putting the cart before the horse but I have a feeling that AT&T went really cheap on Stingray and am having Urge nightmares, lol.
2. I do not expect that most of you will agree with me but I wanted to share what I posted as a direct message with Stingray. Thanks for reading.
Dave
Good day - I am a customer of AT&T U-Verse. I am one who loves to listen to music via my U-Verse cable box. AT&T offered two GREAT ways of doing this, one was via Media Share, which allowed you to stream your own music from your PC to the box and the other way was the industry leader Music Choice. WELL, AT&T pulled the plug on Media Share the day that the Stingray app went live (maybe a coincidence) but now we have learned that the Music Choice channels are going away on Feb 28th 😞 to be replaced by 75 channels from Stingray. Hmmmm. The reason for my doubt is founded in that AT&T had Music Choice from U-Verse's startup in 2006. Some outfit called Urge swayed AT&T into signing with them and MC was dropped. Urge was just DREADFUL, playing mostly obscure songs from either familiar or even unfamiliar artists. Users revolted and some even cancelled U-Verse over it. Eventually Urge went away MC was brought back in 2011. Now, U-Verse is again giving up on the industry leader, Music Choice, in favor of Stingray. While I'm hopeful that the new Stingray channels will be first rate, I am having severe doubts after playing music from the Stingray app on U-Verse. Last night I played Jukebox Oldies. Of the 12 songs that I forced myself to set through, I did not recognize NINE of them! I only liked and sang along with one of them. I then listened to 12 songs on Music Choice and knew all of them and 11 were "sing along with" worthy. I see the Urge fiasco occurring again, if some efforts are not put into programming these channels. The same experiment was applied to "Remembering the 80's channel" and "Classic Country." Unfamiliar artists, unfamiliar or poor cover songs. Yecch! Please try and emulate what MC is doing. I am pulling for you as I love my music. Thanks for allowing me to share my opinion. Good luck!
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
Fox Mulder
Former Employee
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187 Messages
10 years ago
URGE!! yikes
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
Unfortunately Fox, I see this having a serious chance at being Urge 2.0. I have listened to the Stingray App three times and a total of about an hour and have heard Leah by Roy Orbison each time i listened. Three times over four days, with total time listened of an hour for a song I've never heard, 'til now. Leah was a #25 "hit." Doesn't look good for music fans.
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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Anonymous
1.9K Messages
10 years ago
I think Fox should put a rabbit in the AT&T house and chase it until we get media share back!!
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mitchflorida
Scholar
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187 Messages
10 years ago
Buy a Roku for $40 or less and then you can play your personal media and also Pandora and Spotify and several other music apps. From what I have heard on Stingray, I like it a lot.
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
Thanks. I actually now have a rooted Amazon Fire TV box and a Matricom G-Box, which should be able to use android DLNA apps, like BubbleUpNp. My fear is that the wife, who loves to have music playing while doing housework won';t be able to use them. She knows the Music Choice oldies channel # by heart. Listening to the oldies channel on Stingray's app, has me wondering who is programming it. We shall see if it gets better with live channels.
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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mibrnsurg
Expert
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4.3K Messages
10 years ago
Dave, have to say I've been listening to the last 45 mins of Jukebox Oldies and knew every song, right now Tom Jones "Green Green Grass of Home", now The Crystals "He's a Rebel", now The Everly Brothers "Lucille", now Bobby Comstock "Let's Stomp", now Ricky Nelson "I'm Walkin", now The Monkees "I'm a Believer" (knew from that first organ blast), now The Animals "It's my Life" (knew this one from 1st note), now Simon and Garfunkel "Mrs. Robinson", now Wayne Newton "Danke Schoen"
Does it make a difference when you listen, who knows, this last hour + has been very listenable and singable.
Chris
__________________________________________________________
Please NO SD stretch-o-vision or 480 SD HD Channels
Need Help? PM ATT Uverse Care (all service problems)
ATT Customer Care(all other problems)
Your Results May Vary, In My Humble Opinion
I Call It Like I See It, Simply a U-verse user, nothing more
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
Maybe they listened to me.
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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jeremy1069fm
Scholar
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79 Messages
10 years ago
If you're interested, here's the music logs of what Stingray plays. This is from their U.S. service.
Pick a channel, and on the right you can see what they have been playing.
http://music.stingray.com/en_US/channels
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
Five stars for posting that @jeremy1069fm . I actually saw that but failed to share it. Thanks again!
Now, I do not know about most of the channels but let's look at the last hour of Classic Country (I added my comments in bolded italics😞
Burl Ives
Reba McEntire
Faron Young
The Oak Ridge Boys
Linda Ronstadt
Bill Justis
George Jones
Johnny Cash
Tammy Wynette
Charley Pride
Mel Tillis
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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rbrown3333
Contributor
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1 Message
10 years ago
Working from home today... Thought I would play some music through Uverse and remove some stress on my laptop. I was suprised to find the old channels had been replaced. I have to say that I am NOT impressed so far...
One reason to listen to classic rock, oldies, and music by decade is because the old junk gets left behind and the better stuff survives. Not everything was top of the charts before the change to Stingray but at least I was familiar with everything in the playlist. No so here. So far roughly every 6th or 7th song is pretty much junk. Tried about 5 different channels... same thing each time so far. (It's may not be quite as bad as the original poster feared it would be... but it is not worth listening too either.)
Also, I played around with the menus, found the videos and tried them. Even less impressed here... The playback stops and starts like a bad internet connection.
Back to YouTuybe I guess.
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
@rbrown3333 - Yep, pretty dreadful. I am the OP and it dependfs on the channel's programmer. Some channels it may be 6-7 songs before they play one that you know and like. The 70s channel played "Midnight Blue" by Melissa Manchester which I loved and I'm not sure if MC played that. So, some are better than others.
I may send a snail mail letter to the Stingray CEO detailing how bad the music is. You can contact AT&T directly to complain - I would recommend that you send a private message to the escalation team at AT&T Customer Care, and someone will get in touch with you.
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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jerrys2
Contributor
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1 Message
10 years ago
I agree!
We like easy listening and sting ray has a bunch of junk that I have never heard of.
With Music Choice it was all instrumental and we knew the songs.
We have to press the ok button to start each channel,with MC all we needed to do was to press the up and down button.
The picture on the screen goes on and off with Sting ray.
Not happy with Sting Ray.
This must be the CHEAPEST music you could get!
jerrys2
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dhascall
ACE - Master
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1.4K Messages
10 years ago
You should all see the reply posts about Stinkray (Ben5160 actually made me chuckle), on AT&T U-Verse's Facebook page. Every other reply was on the lack of good music channels and the rest were on FS1. Got some amazing folks doing amazing things there at AT&T HQ, lol.
*I am not a DIRECTV employee, and the views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.
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dianelf
Contributor
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1 Message
8 years ago
How about if Stingray separates the '50's from the '60's and then in the '50's category separates the lightweights (Frankie Avalon, Pat Boone, etc) from the real rockers (Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.) and does the same in the 60's between soul, pop, and easy rock? If they can't do that much, then all I can surmise is that the programmers must have grown up in the '90's believing that boy bands are rockers and theyre ignorant of the fact that there were drag down bloody fights between those who punched disco tunes into jukeboxes and those of us who rocked. Oh and hey! An Everly bros tune is on Jukebox Oldies now. They did have a couple of rockers but this one, "Devoted To You" doesn't. I've never heard of it. Oh my heavens! Now flippin' Pat Boone is trying to do "Ain't That a Shame". Give me a break. Why do I feel like this is streaming and Stingray is being rude?
Diane
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Anonymous
1.9K Messages
8 years ago
I love music also and did not like Uverse music selection. This is the way I solved the problem. You may not want to do this but I bought the Amazon Echo and subscribed to Prime with music unlimited. The echo allows you to pull music from several music sources. Pandora, Iheart, and Spotfly. I can choose my own music and Amazon Unlimited has over 10 million songs and over 200 music channels for 9.95 per month. The Echo has very good sound quality. I have created my own playlist with 2600 songs and I will play from the preset playlists and if I hear a song I like I will tell Alexa the voice of Echo to add to my music. If you like a song or artist you can have the song added to your music buy just saying Alexa add song to my music and it is added. It is far advanced then anything on my TV. This is just a idea if you do not mind spending a little money. I am listening to it now and it is playing the Beatles "Hard days night" As a Beatle Fan I have had a hard time finding any music service that has an extensive Beatlies collection. It also has songs I have not heard in 50 years. As I said I have not found 1 song they they could not find and play for me. If it was recorded they have it. I hope this helps
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