For those who don't know, Paul Lamere, the author, is a really cool guy that works over at The Echo Nest (recently acquired by Spotify). I had the pleasure of meeting him and chatting with him a few times last summer while I was interning there and he's basically a music+tech genius. Lots of the echo nests coolest api demos are all his doing. I'd link to stuff but I'm on my phone, but definitely browse through his blog. If this is your area of interest, Paul is the guy to read.<p>edit: on my comp now, so I can add this link to some cool EN API demos, many of which are Paul's if I recall correctly: <a href="http://static.echonest.com/labs/demo.html" rel="nofollow">http://static.echonest.com/labs/demo.html</a>
I wonder how this affects the writing of songs.<p>“It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”<p><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_seabrook" rel="nofollow">http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_...</a>
Another analysis I'd like to see is how many songs people skip in a row. When I skip a song I end up skipping a bunch of songs until I find just the right one that I want to listen to at that moment, and I speculate that most of the quick skips come in these sorts of runs. If that's true, then it'd be interesting to try and figure out what properties the songs users end up on have as compared to the ones that they skip over.
Very tangential but I used to skip songs a lot and make a lot of custom playlists but have moved towards listening to albums front-to-back and not skipping songs. I still have a couple small playlists that are a sort of "greatest hits" of my collection that I shuffle every once in a while.<p>It has greatly improved my listening experiences in general, and has made me discover songs I forgot I had/ I didn't listen to much before.
Interestingly, Last.fm introducing a skip limit of 6, with no way to remove the limit even for paying subscribers was what finally pushed me away from Last.fm and on to Spotify.
I think the constant non-zero skip rate throughout the entire song length is explained by people who would have skipped the song at the beginning but who weren't present when the song started (e.g. they went to the kitchen to get a drink). These people would skip the song as soon as they get back, which could be at any point within the song.
I'd be interested in how often skipping is used on new songs vs ones we've heard many times before. Is it possible that a song can only become popular if it hooks the listener in the 1st 10-20 seconds? Important for songwriters to know.<p>Skipping is not a new 'iPhone' phenomenon. CD player in your car has a next-track button. Even the car radio - changing the channel was common. So no, music today isn't getting some sort of 'raw deal', or at least no more than ever.
One possible explanation for why user's skip behavior varies by time of day/week is that they're more likely to be playing songs around friends. A lot of times you'll want to show just one part of a song to someone, or you want to manage several requests for songs when you're out.
Going a bit further... I wonder if anybody has thought of using the skip rate as a way of A/B testing pop songs, for instance similar arrangements of the same song.