What's on your iPod?
Have you ever wondered what is on all of those iPods out there? I did a little study of some iPod data graciously provided by Mark Young of the iTunes Registry. The iTunes registry is a site where folks upload their iTunes usage data and see all sorts of aggregate statistics about what genres, artists and songs are popular. I was interested in looking at individual iPod usage patterns. This iTunes registry data was perfect for this. It had data for over 5,600 iPod users (anonymized of course). Now obviously this isn't exactly scientific. These were self-selecting users, who were geeky enough to want to upload their iTunes data to a website. They are probably not your typical iPod user (but its the best data I have). Here's what I found:
| Average collection size | 3,542 Songs |
| Average plays | 5568 |
| Average number of songs purchased from iTunes |
72 |
| Users with less than 100 songs | 7% |
| Active songs (80% of plays) | 23% |
| Largest Collection | 50,458 |
| Songs never played | 64% |
| Manually Rated songs | 17.00% |
The active songs statistic is one of the most interesting. For this statistic, I was interested in looking at what percentage of songs were part of the active rotation for a listener. So I looked to see what percentage of each user's collection was responsible for 80% of plays. It turns out that 80% of all plays are concentrated into just 23% of the tracks. Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that 64% of the over 20,000,000 tracks had never ever been played (not even once). This means that the average ipod user (with 3542 songs), actively listens to about 800 songs in their collection, and has never listened to about 2200 songs. I also looked to see if the folks who spent a lot of time rating their songs (5 stars, 1 star) tended to listen to more of their collection. Surprisingly, there was no correlation between frequent song rating and broader listening coverage. Frequent song raters have the same number of rarely listened to or never listened to songs on their iPod.
What does this all mean? One possible interpretation is that the tools that are out there for exploring and accessing our personal music collections are just not adequate. Shuffle play, smart playlists, click wheel scrolling through thousands of albums, and all the other ways you can select music on your iPod are just not adequate tools for dealing with our larger personal music collections. Clearly there's some opportunities here to improve the listening coverage of music listeners. The next generation portable music player is going to need to provide much better onboard tools to enable music exploration and discovery even within our own music collections.