EclecticLip

I decided it was time to check my iTunes playlist again (previous update here) to see how well Mr. Pareto predicted my music listening habits.

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Not too shabbily, as it turns out — he slipped a bit from before, but that’s largely because this time, I decided not to include tracks which I’ve never played.  (There are currently about 400 tracks which for whatever reason have never deserved my time.    )

Another slight difference is that I eventually moved some audiobooks out of my music directory (that would’ve removed about 200 tracks from consideration).

OK, it’s not quite a taxonomy, but Flowing Data has a brilliant flow chart / classification method for heavy-metal band names.

Thumbnail below; click here for the chart in its full comic resplendence.

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Christian Children’s Fund of Canada is using John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is over) as background music for their latest funding campaign.

It’s been forty-two years since that whole “(we’re) bigger than Jesus” thing, so I guess it’s a case of forgive and forget.  Clearly, he got off easy — it took about 380 years or so for Galileo to be cleared. 

iTunes has become colossally successful, having sold 5+ billion songs, according to recent estimates.

Jevon’s paradox says that as a resource gets cheaper, usage increases.  I wonder if this is an example of a generalized version of Jevon’s paradox.  Namely: (in the absence of discontinuous innovations) as a good or service gets cheaper, usage increases.

This phenomenal success seems likely to be due to a “Jevons paradox”-ification of the cost of music.  For people who want to pay for music, that is. 

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The new album, coming March 23.

I can’t wait.