Monday, June 27, 2011

Music Library Stats

For the fun of it, I tried copy & pasting my iTunes library into Excel. In wonderful delight, I found that it sort of worked. Well, I couldn't stop there. I created a pivot table and whipped up these views. First, here are some stats:

Timeframe: September 2010 - Yesterday (basically, since I switched to Mac)
Number of Songs in library: 829
Total number of songs played: 9,084
Total play time in library: 2.2 days
Total Computer Storage required: 4.25 GB
Average Times a song is played: 11

Cool. Let's check out a distribution:
(PS. This is my first time using Excel on my mac for something like this. It was a fun experience.)


First, every song has been played at least once, with most number of plays being 56. Second, there's a huge spike at 10. That isn't random - let me explain. iTunes has a feature called "iTunes DJ" where it loads in songs automatically, semi-randomly, playing "popular" songs more. Popularity is determined, as far as I can tell, by the rating you give it (stars) and by how many plays it has. What this means is that if you play a song a lot, it'll get played more and more and more. Furthermore, a rating of 1 star is more "popular" than not being rated at all (0 stars).

So here's what I do: First, I rank every song as 3 stars, and then change it over time. This way 1 star really is the worst.

Second, I created a smart playlist that only contains songs that have less than 10 plays. That means, when a song hits 10 plays, it leaves the playlist. I choose this playlist all the time when using iTunes DJ (which is a majority of the time). As a result, I have a huge spike at 10 because the song exits the playlist and doesn't get played again for a while. Once all my songs are at 10, I'll probably move up to 20 and capture a significant chunk of my songs again.

Next, lets look at genres:


The majority of my library is Christian and soundtrack (which if there were sub-categories, Disney would be the largest). Pop/Rock, Rock & Holiday also make a good showing. I also have one genre named "genre". Clearly a tagging mistake I should fix.

Finally, let's look at some specific artists. The first table is sorted by the number of songs in my library by that artist. The second table is sorted by the number of times I've played a song by that artist.


Well, my mom would be proud to see Kenny Loggins in the #1 slot. There also appears to be a pretty high correlation between the number of songs in my library and the number of times played - only 2 from each list (the *) are not in the other list. Also notable, Hillsong United is a recent addition to my library, so I'm not surprised to see the low play count.

That's it. There's your Monday morning stats. :)

By the way, my #1 played song is "I Will Follow" by Chris Tomlin at 56 times.

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