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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."
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!
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!!!
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...
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.