Vowe posts a link to a study by Paul Lamere on the statistics that were gathered by his iTunes Registry.
The whole article is worth reading. I found a couple interesting points in the analysis:
“It turns out that 80% of all plays are concentrated into just 23% of the tracks. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that 64% of the over 20,000,000 tracks had never ever been played (not even once). This means that the average ipod user (with 3542 songs), actively listens to about 800 songs in their collection, and has never listened to about 2200 songs.”
I think that's just nuts! I can't imagine what it's like to have listening habits like that. Are people just listening to the same songs over and over because they like to, or because the random shuffle feature doesn't take play frequency into account? I'm hoping it's the latter but I'm afraid it's the former...those numbers sound like they'd line up with how radio stations work.
Personally, I'd hate a rotation like that. I hate commercial radio because of it. I'm becoming increasingly dissatisfied with XM Satellite Radio for the same reason. I've spent a lot of time since I got an iPod trying to work out how to get a good thorough mix across my music library when I'm listening to music. My most recent thinking is based on what I found in a post I did in March about some Smart Playlist resources I found. Below is a breakdown of my iTunes library:
Collection Size: 4022
Plays: 5694
Number of songs purchased from iTunes: 2
Active songs (80% of Plays): 50%
Sings never played: 872
Manually rated songs: 1215
It looks like my persistence is paying off. I'm getting a pretty good mix of music across my library. Definitely higher than average. How much higher was kind of surprising to me to be honest. Looking at the numbers, I think I'm going to need to raise the representation of unplayed songs in my main mix playlist, and I need to get back into the habit of rating my songs.
Technorati Tags: iPod, iTunes, Music, Technology
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