Wednesday, January 05, 2011

How big is an average music library?

Have you ever got music library envy, and felt that your stack of digital music files might be on the light side?

Tidysongs reckons it's 7,160 tracks.

A note of caution here: that's based on people who've invited their software to clean up said libraries. And people who only have a few tracks in their collection are less likely to bother paying for a service to tidy up - partly because they can still do it by hand, if they wish; partly because if you don't have that much music on your PC, you're clearly not that fussed about music.

Still, it's an interesting statistic, in a pub-quiz-tiebreaker sort of fashion. Hypebot reports some further numbers:

* The average number of songs missing album artwork is 4,230
* The average number of songs missing the name of the artist is 490.
* The average number of songs missing track or year information is 1,984.
* The average number of duplicate songs is 814.
They suggest that 'dirty' songs must indicate some sort of wrongdoing:
Why would you have dirty songs?

Either you ripped a bunch of songs off random CD-Rs or are using LimeWire Pirate Edition, among other things, because iTunes and Amazon downloads come complete with artwork and don't have any misspellings in the titles.
Perhaps. Or, perhaps, you've ripped them from CDs you paid money for. Or downloaded them from a legitimate source that didn't have artwork, or correct tagging. Again, things that you might expect people with larger collections to be doing.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

814 duplicate songs? Seriously? Unless you're a hardcore collector of compilations and best ofs by bands you already like, I can't see how anyone ends up with over 10% of their library being duplicates.

Dave Heasman said...

I may well have 800 duplicates. I have the Bear family Duane Eddy & all the individual albums, f'rexample, the Chess complete Chuck Berry and a load of individual albums. Also 600+ anthologised 20-track oldies collections, all via mailing lists, and if you don't pay, or don't pay much, and you have 2 terabytes it's easier to just download and damn the duplication.

Anonymous said...

Duplicate schmuplicate! Unless you're the sort of person who likes having "[live version]" or "[single edit]" as part of a track title (there should really be a dedicated metadata field for this kind of info), it's simply to end up with loads of so-called duplicates if you like an artist, particularly in this era of cottage industry bands who put out official live bootlegs after every album.

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