I was looking at my iTunes library and wondered how it was distributed across ratings and number of plays and such. [For those people who think I need more to do, to quote Bill the Cat: Thbbft!]
So, for my first graph, this is songs by number of stars.
A couple things should jump out at you, or at least jumped out at me:
- It feels like have a lot of music. If you believe the summary at the bottom of iTunes, I have 35.5 days worth of music listening time. The longest song is a Mahler Symphony. The shortest is a five second snatch off the Psyche Furs Talk Talk Talk.
- I have some number (608) songs that I have not rated yet. That just means I am behind, because there is a playlist of songs that have been played, but not rated, and that playlist is empty.
- There are some songs, 313 of them, that I have kept even though they have only one star. These are likely songs that are part of a full album (I’m looking at you, Picture This from the Beastie Boy’s Hello Nasty album), and I don’t want to break up the album. Ditto the 879 two star songs.
- There are lots of songs that are rated three stars. There are 4,813 of them, to be exact, or roughly 36% of my library. What’s up with that? What’s up with that is that I use three stars as my indicator that something doesn’t stink (one or two stars) but that it never needs to bubble up to the four or five star playlists. In other words, three star songs are likely to be played only if I am playing the whole album, and not for their own sake. A good example of that is Ordinary World off Duran Duran’s Greatest Hits album. It is between A View to a Kill and Save a Prayer, so it gets more plays than it deserves as a three star song.
I’ll do more analysis later, but leave me your thoughts below.