How popular is shuffle play?




I admit, I am no fan of shuffle play. Turn on shuffle play with a 10,000 song ipod and bad things tend to happen: my daughter's Hilary Duff  track follows my son's Audioslave, leading to the dreaded iPod whiplash.  My suspicion is that most people have the same experience ... that shuffle play sucks, and therefore they don't use it.  But ... it turns out, I'm wrong.

A survey by Paul Doncaster finds that:

a strong majority of iPod users surveyed (4 to 1) say they listen in shuffle mode more than 50% of the time, with half of those indicating that they listen in shuffle mode 80-100% of the time.


People use shuffle play much more than I thought.  This leads me to wonder if they do this because they like shuffle play or because making playlists is too much bother. I tend to think it is the latter.

It's an interesting survey, that is worth reading.

Posted on: Jul 31, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

Permanent link to this entry

Comments:

Hey Paul, I have some very specific opinions and thoughts on this, but I'll bet you can already guess what they are...

Posted by Zac Johnson on July 31, 2006 at 11:51 AM EDT #

Keep in mind that you can use shuffle within a playlist, just to get random playing order. I bet only a few people use shuffle on the whole library.

Posted by dr.Zoiberg on July 31, 2006 at 12:37 PM EDT #

And, I believe, a lot of people have relatively small collections of music on their ipods so the whiplash may not be as bad as those of us with large, varied collections.

Posted by Tristan on July 31, 2006 at 03:55 PM EDT #

It might be that the people that do this only have music that they like on their iPod rather than the whole families music collection. I don't use shuffle that much because I like to listen to albums in the original order. It took me two years of having an iPod before I created a single playlist! On the other hand my wife does use shuffle quite a lot, and the contents of our iPods are identical; she just presses the "next" button when she gets some of my metal tracks rather than her bubble pop stuff :-)

Posted by Darren J Moffat on August 01, 2006 at 09:53 PM EDT #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.

This blog copyright 2010 by plamere