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there’s music out there laying in wait
A few months ago, my external hard drive died. It had all my music on it, nearly ten years of accumulated mp3s from various sources: ripping my own collection, music from my friends, buying downloads from various sources, those glorious months in 2002 when eMusic gave you unlimited downloads, and almost certainly a few things that were torrented. It was a pretty devastating loss, really; much of it is easy enough to find again, but some of my favorite things were lost to the ether and I haven’t been able to get them back.
I tried to look on the bright side, though; organizing my itunes is always this horrible ordeal and it’s never finished and there were a few months that I didn’t really listen to music because the mere IDEA of opening my itunes gave me anxiety attacks. (You know the ones: HOW DO WE TAG THE TAGS?!) So declaring itunes bankruptcy seemed like an okay idea! I could pull in the album I wanted to listen to right then, make sure the metadata was okay, listen, move on. That had actually been going fairly well, even if I couldn’t necessarily put my hands on some rare b-side from back when there were actualfax b-sides.
…and then I started listening to Hip shows. I have maybe 170 right now, which is not a lot compared to the hardcore people who have been doing this for a long time, but seems ludicrous to people who don’t do it. And I was digging through my itunes the other night, looking for a particular show, and realized that I have once again got to the point where I don’t recognize a lot of the stuff in my itunes, and the rest of it is the Hip. I joked with a friend that my itunes has started spawning new music again, and he laughed at me. [We have a running joke that my itunes is some kind of musical font, because somehow it is always full of stuff I do not recognize and have never listened to, and sometimes I find it and am like, okay, what the hell is THIS and where did it even come from? I mean, I download stuff, yeah, but it's not like I have told my computer to just go download every mp3 on the internet, but sometimes I feel like that's exactly what it's done.] Then he related a conversation he had with some of his buddies about how most people have around 600 songs digitally available and then probably a handful of albums that haven’t been ripped in some manner. He has around 7,000, and his friends felt this was a LOT of music. I felt it was probably about average, and so I decided to ask the people I know and tally results.
I’m pretty much ready to declare the experiment over, because the average has now been holding steady for the last 20 people I’ve entered, even when their answer consists of a screenshot of a music folder, which is on its own 1-tb drive and contains 52,000+ songs and includes no boots or shows. Commercial releases only!
After that long-winded and probably boring explanation, here are the results:
total respondents: 56
total songs: 527,168
low answer: 0
high answer: 52,760
average song count: 9,413
median song count: 5,679
throwing out the freaks: 5,391 (this is the average of respondents who have fewer than 20,000 songs; it’s close to the median, which a math teacher informed me was the better number to use as an indicator anyway)
<10,000 songs: 43 people
10-20,000 songs: 5 people
>20,000 songs: 8 people
Responses collected by checking out all the shared itunes folders at work, asking twitter, asking LJ/DW, and asking on the hipbase (the Tragically Hip fan forum, which I expected to skew the results more than it actually did — I figured people there were likely to have a lot of music, and unlikely to have it all digitized; in the end, it was a wash).
The caveats here are, of course, huge. Some people answered with the size of their collection, and so I divided it by 6 megs to get a song count that is probably wrong. Many people estimated their answers. Many people told me that they have a lot of stuff that isn’t ripped; a few have literal rooms full of vinyl that has never been digitized. I got answers about ipod vs hard drive; work vs home; hard drive vs music server. In those cases, I used the highest number, because I figured that’s the one that more accurately represented the answer to my [extremely poorly worded] question about how much digital music is available to people for listening. Some people gave range estimates; I took the middle number in that case.
For a while it was looking as if most people either had fewer than 10,000 songs or more than 20,000 songs; there weren’t a lot of people in between. That settled out a bit, but it’s the reason for the breakdown in the number of people with n songs. Many of the people I would consider music geeks didn’t have too many songs digitized, but made a point to say, “this isn’t even close to my entire music collection.”
So! I have drawn the following conclusions:
- I was right.
- My collection is totally and completely reasonable.
Nothing like bad stats and terrible science to validate my position! \o/