So I am not the only one who came up with this subject! I found an article by David Braue on the Australian version of CNET.com in which he describes an experiment he did with iTunes. You can find the article here:
iTunes: Just how random is random?
The first four conclusions from his experiment were:
- 20 playlists (10 of 25 songs, and 10 of 40 songs) were created from a pool of 100 iTunes Music Store sourced songs, and 20 additional playlists when the pool was expanded to 200 songs using CD-ripped songs. This provided a total of 1300 slots to be filled at random.
- On average, one would expect each song to appear on 6.5 playlists.
- Popular, top-50 singles were rotated onto our playlists far more frequently than would be expected. Some artists, having just one song in the iTunes Library, were played more often than the entire 5-song collections of other artists.
- Artists and singles purchased through iTunes were played more frequently than those that were not.
So how about that one?
(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)
