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

[danielrose]

See, i just download it and take it. If i like it i'll listen to it again. I wouldn't pay anyone though, that'd be a false economy. Why pay for what I already have??

I Wish This Were True...

[torrentami]

because it puts a smile on my face just thinking about someone focusing on christian music going bankrupt.

Re:He also references the "Birthday Paradox"

[Vengie]

With apologies to Dilbert....

[Tour of Accounting]
Accounting Troll: "Over here we have our random number generator"

Number Generator Troll: "Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine Nine"

Dilbert: "Are you sure that's random?"

Accounting Troll: "That's the problem with randomness: you can never be sure"