Survey: Measuring Success and Failure by # of Plays
How many times would you expect to play a track or an album for it to have been a good purchase? Is something you only play once or twice a failure? Is # of plays a valid metric?
It’s come up several times recently that even those who might otherwise give eMusic the benefit of the doubt are unsubscribing b/c they expect even the best of what’s left to get played “maybe once or twice.” A lot of folks apparently have copious copies of stuff in your libraries that you’ve never ever played, and I don’t really understand.
As an empirical test, how many times have you played your favorite tracks and albums? Does the # differ systematically for your all-time favorites versus the average eMusic/Bandcamp download or (god forbid,) stream? (whether exactly in iTunes or other apps that count plays exactly or a ballpark figure over your lifetime dating back to physical media)
Where do you draw the line, in terms of # of plays, for a particular download to have been a mistake?
I’m genuinely curious. (this is from another forum, but I'd love to know your answers, too)
I remember Brian Eno citing a stat that the average CD gets played only twice, but I’ll be darned if I can find the interview, probably from the 1990s, and if it has the source in a footnote. Can anyone else update that # for the streaming and non-physical media age?
Comments
My OP, so I’ll go first with data but save interpretation until there’s more…
I think I’ve listened to my all-time favorite album, “In Sides” by Orbital (1996) about fifty times. Would be more if my brothers hadn’t blasted it and made me not like it for a time in high school, but I don’t count those plays.
I play tracks in iTunes, and nothing got played more than 15 times on my old laptop over the course of five years using it. On my new machine I’ve had for half a year, top tracks by Boozoo Bajou, Timber Timbre, Hot Sugar, NZCA/Lines and others (about half from eMusic) have been played seven times.
As for listening habits, which I think will determine play #s more than “quality,” I always listen to everything I download from eMusic twice as a full album and then add it to a large playlist for shuffling at random. I choose albums I really want to hear a little more than half the time and shuffle the rest of the time. I remember @confused had a very regimented protocol and would enjoy reading more.
Even with sampling I regret downloading plenty from eMusic. It’s rare that I listen more than twice to those. I won’t provide examples unless someone is very curious.
Downloads get played, generally, less often. I have a large number either unplayed or with a play count of 1 or 2. This is a function of the fact that I was downloading more albums a month with a big grandfathered plan from emusic at one point than I could keep up with playing. As I am no longer buying anything form them I am trying to catch up on my backlog - as I type this I am listening to Ali Farka Toure's Savanne. Some tracks have a 1 count whilst others are zero.
To some extent a purchase counts as a failure when it is no longer on my iPod. That has a big memory but can't cope with all I have in iTunes. Often removal from my iPod is based on a very brief sample of tracks - not good I know, but my hopwe is that I will go back one day.... I probably need to make more time for listening. Ironically that has decreased since retiring. I'd normally play music when marking, preparing, reading etc as well as driving to visit student teachers on placement for my University job. Now I do other thngs that do not allow so much listening time.
Not a full amswer but I hope it helps
@greg As I replied on another forum, there’s clearly an academic, anthropological yet quantitative study to find in these highly personal accounts, and I would honestly love to read a whole book-length compilation of them. If CD players kept track of playcounts, I might dive into the data and never emerge. The number of professors commenting here is heartening, and maybe a project for if I ever retire from precarious global quasi-adjuncting.
Even if I don’t like something after two plays or sometimes more, I have an aversion to deleting anything, even if the hd is getting full, for the possibility that I’ll come back to it years later and like it. It’s happened a few times, a topic for another thread.
Like you, staying on the main machine and making the transfer cut to the new one is my basic standard. I hope the backlog (re-)discovery process is enjoyable for you.
I’d appreciate knowing what you think you’ve played the most ever and whether that happens to be your all time favorite album.
I figure we’re going to get asymptotes on these forums, but I’m still impressed by your meticulous reply. I think I’ve heard an album by Namlook once and definitely appreciate a little ambient sleep prompting. I also know my uncle has been looping a particular space music album almost constantly in his makeshift physics laboratory for years, so I think your #s in the hundreds and regularly as much as my favorite album aren’t so atypical. Do you see your listening habits as unusual or extreme in this regard?
I share your commitment with @confused to make sure nothing goes unplayed and wonder how common this is. Another poster elsewhere suggested that streaming rather than owning music completely erases this feeling of obligation, and I wonder if people who have an unappreciated “heap” as you put it, with tons of unplayed stuff, are missing out or if we’re taking our collections entirely too seriously and self-importantly.
I would go on forever about my listening habits but get self-conscious. I am pleased that others are happy to share theirs here and hope for similar surveys in the future, with overwhelming response rates.
That’s some creative use of the iTunes star ratings; I was pretty annoyed by replacing them with the binary Love/Hate unless you list all songs together or get info.
Overall, I think anyone like us who can claim with a straight face that we have a written protocol for listening to music is a far outlier, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong by more replies here. Very interesting and impressive, again…your system puts mine to shame.
Food-music comparisons were how I sustained a relationship for a few years with a foodie and the basis of ongoing friendship, so let the metaphors flow!
Over at "goodreads," every book I've rated on my page has either a 4 or 5 star rating because, maybe being older, I'm more sure of my interest beforehand in that book (or in this case, music) that I've bought. With music in most cases, it's bought after I've already listened and enjoyed it (which is a beautiful modern development - close to the old days of listening booths) and it ends up in the music library to come up again at some time in the future. This is probably why the number of listens per song is much more of a streamlined thing for me if you check my Last.FM page all-time track listing.
That's a mighty diverse playlist, and I can't say I've heard of much of it. Bravo for that. Agreed that listening mostly on shuffle leads to a very egalitarian and by definition random distribution of spins ("scrobbles"?), thereby making the top tracks say less about you than the logarithm. I get that sometimes I don't want to think about what album to play next every half an hour to 45 minutes, but I also don't like to have to skip stuff that's jarring or doesn't fit the situation. Listening to totally new stuff on shuffle is too much adventure for me, but again, I like to hear about how everyone listens differently.
Sometimes you can stand in the right spot in the house and get an earful of combinations that you’d not knowingly arrange yourself.
I don't think the raw totals are necessarily unusual - I singled out those albums because it always felt weird to me (especially when I used to scrobble on last.fm) to have my most-played albums be ones that I was mostly asleep for. Perhaps I place too much value on being conscious while listening :-).
I go back and forth on this regularly. My own approach does from time to time push me into a state where I am listening out of obligation to serve the rotation, and I have to remind myself that I can listen to whatever I feel like listening to. At least as often, though, it makes me rediscover things that I enjoy but might not have remembered to choose. And most of the time I am just having fun listening. There's definitely a spontaneity<-->intentionality dialectic going on. I can really see both sides of whether a form of listening that "erases this feeling of obligation" is a good thing or a bad thing. I lean different ways different days. I try to account for that in what rotates onto the iPod with the "surprise me" and "permanent listens" lists. But I am thinking of overhauling the system with a bent toward greater serendipity.
Well, my short answer is no, the amount of plays doesn't determine the the success or failure of my decision to own/download it.
I've been collecting records (33.3,45,78) 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and now MP3s since I was 10 in 1962 and got this album from my Grandparents for my birthday.
You can get a peek at my vinyl collection and a portion of @rostasi's in the Vinyl Solution. Now, that 1st album wasn't the best music but it certainly is a favourite because I think of my Grandparents every time I see it. I've got lots like that in my collection- so-so music with great memories attached to them. I'd have to say that I was much more connected with my vinyl than I've ever been with MP3s. Holding that square foot while listening really made the difference. I can scan through my vinyls and remember what they sound like by simply seeing the album cover spline. I just haven't found the connection with iTunes. Of course when I only had 10 albums they got played a lot and now that I have access to thousands they don't. However, I've recently retired from work and hopefully find more time to enjoy my favourite pastime. Although, I can relate to @greg when he said that ironically he finds less time since he retired. I find that out most winters when I should have more ass time to listen to music.
Indeed I think music collectors and otherwise obsessives get an unfair shake from judgmental society...even Zweig's doc is a bit dour...whereas something I'd say much less healthy/productive that afflicts my generation and is gaining mainstream acceptance is videogame speedruns. I see that Youtube docs on the subject are almost invariably triumphant and positive. I look at your listening protocol and people's music collections here and say "that's an amazing accomplishment that deserves to be appreciated!" Eccentricity should be celebrated in general, I say, and in the age of cold logarithms, I hope human curation and musical knowledge accumulated in an individual comes to be valued a lot more than it has been.
2: because of the wide range of good music out there, hard-drives are being filled,
but the room furnishing part will begin to be reduced very soon as I transfer titles to Discogs for sale.
3: especially as a youngster, that was a way to discover new things ("who is King Crimson?")
4: basically the reason I've read Wire magazine for decades.
9: yes, but that's pertaining more to box sets and speciality-packaging these days.
First record bought:
I'm fine if this thread gets repurposed for personal nostalgia. Glad to be old enough to remember when vinyl was the primary medium. I don't remember the first album I owned...was given several as a child, but the first CD I bought was at Best Buy near the end of middle school, a live album, sad to say, but it's still a favorite I've played maybe 30 times but not once in the last decade and not five times this century: "The Yellow Shark" by FZ. In fact, I played it in the background for public speaking in sophomore English class and was told it was too distracting.