"Brenda Ann" wrote in message
...

"David Eduardo" wrote in message
.com...
The fact is, most listeners do not have more than a few hundred favorite
songs in any genre. Several recent surveys have shown that the average
number of songs on an iPod is around 300! When you go beyond that number,
in most formats or genres, you are playing songs that listeners don't
really like, which is hardly a gain.

Calling the limiting of a playlist to songs most people like, as opposed
to songs they don't like, is hardly "censorship." It is more like "common
sense."

The reason Baskin Robbins does not have 1000 flavors is that most people
like the same 8 or 10, and occasionally try one or another in an array of
30 to 40. Same with music.

Big difference between ice cream flavors and the number of songs people
like. I find it hard to believe that anyone would limit themselves to a
300 song playlist... that would (and does) drive me totally mad. My
personal library of mp3's (not CD's, I have thousands of those) has over
4500 tracks, all but a handful of which were Billboard Hot 100 or Top 100
Country, and more than 9/10 were Top 40. Some of those that were not in
the Hot 100 were released before Billboard charts existed, and were in the
top 30 of the charts of their day. ~97% of the library is tracks that were
popular during my lifetime from about 5 years old on.

I may be a little eccentric, but I can't believe that the average person
would like only ~7% of the music they hear over a lifetime.. or I doubt
radio would exist. Certainly a 'Top 40' chart would be superfluous..

Radio plays songs that are hits today.... most songs from the past were hits
but are not appealing for many reasons today.

When you actually play songs for real listeners, you find that there is a
very short list in any mass appeal format of songs that are currently
appealing.

The #1 station in San Antonio, which has been #1 for 5 years, played 57
songs for its first 6 months, and plays about 110 songs now.

The #1 music station in LA plays less than 300 songs, and it has been in the
top three or four stations for 16 years.

What listeners do, if they have a variety of tastes, is look for the best of
each genre on different stations. So if you like several genres, you hear
the 300 to 500 best on three different stations... a total of over 1000
songs. And you will find that mood determines genre choice at any one
moment... so you just can't play multiple genres on a single station in most
cases. The exceptions are very rare.