iTunes Conspiracy
OK, maybe I titled this a little dramatically, but it will be fun to see who finds this post in their rant-research!
I work from my home office and listen to my iPod all day…it sort of blends into the background noice. Heck, even when I DO go to the office, I play my iPod on headphones. So I notice patterns that might go unnoticed by a casual listener.
Specifically, I notice that Manheim Steamroller’s Christmas Album seems to be a particular favorite of my iPod’s. Because I have folks ask me about randomization pretty frequently and because the nature of true statistical random selection means that weird patterns can emerge, but over time the weird patterns should fade into the background of random-ness.
So I had a moment between projects today and thought I would do some research on why some artists/songs seem to play in my iPod’s “shuffle” selection more than others.
Interestingly, this guy says that this is actually a helpful feature from our iOverlords! His point is that my iPod pays attention to what songs I skip and eventually exclude those from the shuffle. Bull Pucky! I made (I realize now) the mistake of buying an iTunes special package of Fiona Apple (OMG, I just got the connection…Fiona APPLE: APPLE Computers. Good hell!) that includes not just some songs but Fiona herself droning on about how she wrote songs or how she fought with her studio, or how she goes about being an artist bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz bzzzz…I’m sorry, what were you saying?
Well I can tell you that whenever Fiona starts her random rambling, I skip that trash EVERY TIME, and yet I can expect to have it forced on me (despite actually trying to delete it from iTunes at least once) at least twice a day.
These folks say that it IS random, but that I would have to listen to all the songs in the library in one sitting (without skipping or stopping) and I would hear every song once. BULL PUCKY! I have sat at my desk for a 4 – 5 hour stint and heard the same song (out of many thousand possible choices) TWICE!
So I was pleased to come across someone who had conducted an actual experiment and surprise! It IS a conspiracy! (OK, maybe not, but it’s suspicious as hell). Here’s the full article [David Braue for CNET Australia; published on 08 March 2007].
I totally admire the author’s methodology to test the random-ness..the article was worth the read (it’s relatively short) just to see how they setup the experiment. But note that they tested the creation of random playlists, NOT random play on iTunes or iPods. Assuming the randomisation (Australian spelling used in homage to the author) math is the same for creating playlists and for playing songs, these results should be solid.
Their method was to use a combination of songs ripped from CDs and songs bought from iTunes. Artists were equally represented (i.e. 5 songs each in most cases, except where the experiment dictated something different) and results were tracked by what studio the song came from in case (as was the theory they were working from) there was evidence that studios had paid Apple for preferential treatment for their songs. Songs were added to a library, then assigned randomly to playlists (using iTunes feature for that).
If truly random, one would expect songs to show up evenly for all artists, but that’s NOT what happened!
Here are the summary conclusions:
- 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.
- Four songs — Christina Aguilera’s At Last, Creed’s What’s This Life For, Crowded House’s World Where You Live and Led Zeppelin’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine — were in the iTunes Library but were not chosen for any of the 40 playlists generated during this exercise.
- Lionel Richie (Universal) was iTunes’ favourite artist; his songs were chosen 59 times for 40 playlists [iTunes songs only]. Times per possible playlist (TPP) = 1.475.
- Def Leppard (Universal) was iTunes’ favourite artist among songs ripped from CD; their songs were chosen just 24 times for 20 playlists [iTunes songs and ripped MP3s]. TPP = 1.2
- John Mayer (Sony) was iTunes’ least favourite artist; his songs were chosen just 32 times for 40 playlists [iTunes songs only]. TPP = 0.8.
- Oasis (Sony) was iTunes’ least favourite artist; their songs were chosen just 10 times out of 20 playlists. TPP = 0.5.
- Songs from Universal and EMI showed up in more play lists than their share of the iTunes Library would suggest.
Could this be a result of the relative popularity of each label’s artists, or is somebody conspiring to keep Sony’s numbers lower? Or is this just a natural manifestation of the known deficiencies in computers’ random-number algorithms?
It’s obviously difficult to tell whether back-room marketing deals or just dumb luck were responsible for the results we saw, but it appears that we can safely lend credence to the suspicions of myriad iPod users around the world. When it comes to choosing songs, ‘random’ clearly is relative.
Songs from Warner and Sony showed up in fewer play lists than their share of the iTunes Library would suggest. The disparity was striking in Sony’s case, with the company’s 67 songs (the largest single label representation amongst our Library) accounting for 34.18% of our songs, but chosen for just 18.8% of possible playlists.
So there you have it. Mr Brauer doesn’t come to a conclusion of conspiracy, but it can apparently be safely assumed that “shuffle” on your (and my) iPod is NOT actually random.
As much as I would like to think that Apple (or any corporation) was so pure in its intentions that it wouldn’t let something as crass as profit get in the way of purity-of-experience, I’m sure if Sony Music came to Apple with a check and said, “You know…if our songs played a little more often, that would be so cool!” <wink, wink>
~Geek~
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
I’m sticking with my conspiracy theory for two reasons:
1. The offending Fiona Apple tracks are spoken, no music at all, so if there was music patterning it seems they should actually go extinct eventually.
2. It’s fun to get my shorts in a wad over the iOverlords and their conspiracy to overthrow…umm…random-ness.
Darned gnomes and their love for Fiona Apple and Manheim Steamroller.
A couple of things may at play there when using shuffle- one is that it is my understanding that the shuffle algorithm actually leverages a simplified gracenote algorithm that recognizes patterns in music (e.g. the same technology that allows a cell phone to identify a song by the ‘listening’ to the first few bars of the song and mapping it against its database of songs looking for the same sound fingerprint. Thus shuffle is not truly random, but pattern-random based on fingerprint of last song.
The other is that the gnomes live in my old ipod have a preference for only my kids’ music and the christmas genre when used in shuffle mode.