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."

Comments

Re:iTunes is a monopoly

[mr_sas]

ahh, c'mon, you don't find "They have fought the War on Drugs with skill" funny?

He also references the "Birthday Paradox"

[Vengie]

For anyone looking on an interesting read about stats (that is actually accurate) check out the Birthday Paradox.

The whole "good chance that the same artist will come up in the next 50 songs" is actually the same type of math as the Birthday Paradox. (larger set)

Re:You wonder why the music industry is mad

[swillden]

I listen to NPR a lot. I'm fairly conservative and I find the liberal bias on NPR annoying, but I find it more pleasant to listen to people I disagree with who are trying to be reasonable and evenhanded (even though they'll obviously fail), rather than people I generally agree with ranting with little concern for truth or accuracy.