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Crunching the Math On iTunes
markmcb writes "OmniNerd has posted an interesting article about the statistical math behind iTunes. The author makes some interesting observations concerning the same song playing twice in a row during party shuffle play, the impact that star ratings have on playback, and comparisons with plain old random play (star ratings not considered)." From the article: "To test the option's preference for 5-stars, I created a short playlist of six songs: one from each different star rating and a song left un-rated. The songs were from the same genre and artist and were changed to be only one second in duration. After resetting the play count to zero, I hit play and left my desk for the weekend. To satisfy a little more curiosity, I ran the same songs once more on a different weekend without selecting the option to play higher rated songs more often. Monday morning the play counts were as shown in Table 1."
... how? All I see is a tired old troll :/ Where's the funny / insightful that "satire" implies?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
You don't find that hilarious? Something is wrong with you!
Confirming something instead of just assuming it is the case. What's that called again.. oh yeah, Science! Clearly this article is in the wrong section.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You'd think, with iTunes, that people would be buying music they like (a four or five rating) in a much higher proportion than music they'd rate as a three.
Then there's music added from your own collection. Maybe its just me, but my preferences tend to be stronger than -, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
I usually go through my music collection on a regular basis and delete crap that I don't listen to, which is usually anything less than a three, and definitely a - or a one.
And is 4334 just a random arbitrary # of songs to use?
(when you add up X0 through X5)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In fact, I find that I tend to rate only the songs I *really* like and *really* dislike, and leave the average songs alone. I suspect that I am not alone here. It's akin to the trend of many online forums to attract polarized opinions; i.e., few people take the time to log into forums and post comments that are middle-of-the-road -- typically they're full of "THIS SUCKS" or "HELL YEAH" posts.
Anyone who doesn't catch the inherent parody in
They have fought the War on Drugs with skill
clearly shouldn't be allowed online without a minder.
"I haven't got the time to go around rating my entire music library"
Much less pay for it, I assume. I'm a certifiable geezer by slashdot standards (>40), but I do know a thing or two about music. I was a really hardcore music collector in college, and one core credo was to know everything in your collection inside-out. Practically speaking, it meant that any new addition to the library (vinyl or cassette, if you've heard of either) stayed in a "just-in" quarantine section until I had listened to it enough times to consider it "known".
It is really sad that people amass immense music collections and really don't have any familiarity with the music they have. Well, maybe it isn't actually sad, but I have to wonder what the point is.
Problem is, then you'd end up playing what ITMS wanted you to play. And then they'd get paid by record companies to fix ratings slightly. And... well, you can probably work it out from there.
seeing as how popular crappy music is now adays, you'll probably end up with britney spears playing every few seconds..... that is assuming you have her on your ipod..........
Reads just like one of those anti piracy adverts the MPAA forces us to watch at the movies, or that FACT in the UK put on their DVDs.
Piracy happens because technology happens. We pirate music because it's easy to copy and considerably less than buying it. We don't pirate books because it's frankly too expensive in photocopying charges but there's a whole collection of pirated PDFs out there, if you care to look.
Technology changes the world we live in. I don't recall the Horse & Cart Association of America (HCAA) suing people that moved to cars which put them out of business. I also don't recall the MPAA or RIAA suing Intel, IBM or Microsoft for giving us these tools that enable us to pirate music.
If piracy destroys the music business, so be it. Technology often destroys antiquated business models whether it's children cleaning chimneys, horse drawn carriages, coal mining or farming by hand. These people need to find a business model that works. An artist only makes around 5% from every track sold, the label and distributors cream off the rest. That's unfair, IMO.
Why do we also need to have movie distributors for every corner of the world bidding for the distribution rights? Are we not one global market?
I think it's about time that the movie and music industries were overhauled as they've had way too much power and too much of a monopoly for too long. After all, we're not killing people here with this technology, we're just changing lives. We're just hurting the profit margins, I thought this is what happened in a capitalist and democratic society. Why do we in the Western world create these societies with freedom to innovate and freedom to make money but then try to shackle them when it starts to backfire?
Bring on the technology, lets keep changing the world!!!
But take a look at figure 4...
Rating your songs has an effect, but having done so it often makes little difference whether you use random vs rating-biased play! It seems the difference between these two options is dominated by rating distribution, not by individual ratings!
#1: Asking your punk kid to leave a store is not 'assault'. Our society blows every confrontation into assault. Anything that stops someone from doing anything they damn well please is now assault. WTF? Assault would be taking your laptop and opening your skull up with it. That would be 'assault'. That would also be 'fun' or 'a good thing'.
#2 'I would own you' So, you would sue him from banning your little sperm stain from his store? Are you retarded?
#3: 'Bible thumping fool' Join in on America's new fad: Christian bashing! It's totally fun. And since their religion says turn the other cheek, they don't fight back! Would you say 'koran thumping fool'? No, I think not. Because your are a pussy.
With the checkmark, you mean? True, that works, but I find the thing to be the most confusing part of the entire interface.
The iTunes help says that:
"A black checkmark next to a song means the song will be included in your next action. For example, only songs with black checkmarks are transferred to your iPod or imported when you click the Import button. Or, when you're playing all the songs in a list, only the checked songs play."
But meanwhile, if I select a bunch of tracks and I set a rating via the context menu, all the tracks are rated, even those that aren't marked.
I'd prefer to use an explicit tag that does exactly what I want it too and no more or less, rather than this checkmark thingy that seemingly arbitrarily affects some things, but not others.
From the article: "I grabbed the little shit by his shirt." Technically--yes, this is physical assault because he laid hands on someone in an aggressive manner. And as far as the religious right not fighting back....what rock have you been living under? I do not use the word "christian" because there's very little that is "Christ-like" in the way that most of today's religious leaders and their followers behave. ...but that's another topic entirely...
Everything changes, even how we make a living. I myself paint cars. If someone tomorrow came up with a cheap method for producing car parts that never need to be painted, I would be out of a job while the entire world heralded the new technology as a breakthrough.
We all want to think that once we have our lives in order, they're going to stay that way. Nothing is guaranteed, not even whether yesterdays market will be here tomorrow.
It's no one's fault but your own if you're selling something no one wants to buy.
- When you do things right, no one will be sure you've done anything at all.
His assumption about the ratings distribution is probably wrong. Many people will have mostly 3 - 5 star songs, with a smaller number of 1 and 2 stars. They'll just delete the crap songs instead of rating them lower. How much this factor will affect the distribution is very hard to guess; you'd really need to sample a number people's libraries to have any way of knowing.
Being an almost firm believer in determinism, I would say that there are no such things as (true) random numbers. If we were able to monitor the atmospheric noise (movements of atoms), and predict it perfectly, the numbers would be just as random as pseudo-random numbers generated by computers. However we are nowhere near that kind of technology, like the Googleplex Star Thinker in H2G2, so for the time, yeah, it basically is truly random.
No existe.
I read the headline and imagine a story about the costs and revenues from Apple iTMS. Analysis of running the datacenters: costs of electricity, bandwidth, storage, etc.
Instead I read about some geek with way too much time on his hands. Yawn.
that this entire project seems to be done while at work. Kudos, you are an inspiration to slackers everywhere.