DISQUS

Mark Schoneveld · 1 year ago

That's really interesting. I think music consumption methods will continue to become more ethereal and less physical as we move even beyond iTunes and into cloud services like Last.fm and Hype Machine. One question I have is, will your listening enjoyment get better in the future? Or did 'enjoyment' peak already?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

I don't know if you could say enjoyment of music ever peaks. There's just too much good music.

I tend to always have music on in the background, whether I'm working, blogging, or anything else. Truth is - the world would be a much more fun place and people would be happier if it had a techno soundtrack. That's what I'm trying to recreate. :-)

But yes, if I let the stats drive my listening, it could feel like a chore instead.

Mark Schoneveld · 1 year ago

Truth. There is so much good music out there. How do we consume it all?

I think it comes down to, again, how are we 'discovering' music - who are our filters? Oddly, knowing that several people see my Last.fm stats make me change my listening habits. And that those stats don't jive with what I'm actually listening to (because my wife uses my computer and for some reason jams to Allison Krauss a lot, LOL) bothers me.

CraigK · 1 year ago

It's quite a take off of the long tail format and I've never thought of it before. I don't think the practice works the same way for one specific person when their own preferences are involved. I have close to the amount of songs you have on my itunes, and there are songs on there I would never even dare listen to. Most of the songs are filler songs from CD and my preferences would decide to just skip over them instead of fully deleting them if they were to come on at random. Nice post though, it's a thinker.

Craig
www.budgetpulse.com

digitalshaman · 1 year ago

so questions arise - pardon the observations ... what is the value of the music (we know the expense as we can count the receipts) how about your time? less than 0.03% of albums - long tail is not a proven theory - account for over 50% of major record revenues - do you have similar stats to your own content? ... is this not similar to the impact of user-generated content on networks in general? meaning do you think the value of the content you create (in this post for instance) has an equivalent value with the music you identify here under some set of conditions? do you monitor it? enjoyed the post as usual

Andrew Pass · 1 year ago

I'm a teacher. I wonder how we could use so many songs on so many different ipods to raise student awareness of culture and diversity in a way that they would enjoy, using Web 2.0? Any suggestions?

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

If all your students, with all their iPods, were using tools like
Last.fm, you could analyze their listening activity, see similarities
and discover new songs.

S Yanoff · 11 months ago

I liked this iTunes/iPod stats thing on Facebook, "What's on my iPod?" but I wanted to get the stats without having to upload my file all the time. So, I taught myself a little VB Script and wrote a rudimentary stats/metrics program. It basically spits out a bunch of numbers and lists to a date-stamped file and it takes about a minute to run for every 1,000 songs you have. For me, it takes just over 3 minutes to run on my aging home PC (with nearly 5,000 songs).

You can save it anywhere on your PC and double-click on it and it should run. You may need to have VB.NET installed, so you can go to the Microsoft Updates site for that. I am VERY interested in feedback on this, and I'd welcome enhancements to the script as well.

You can get information and download it at:
http://yanoff.org/music/iTunesStats.shtml

Cheers,
-Scott