Music Machinery

Back in 2001 when the first iPod was released, Shuffle Play was all the rage. Your iPod had your 1,000 favorite songs on it, so picking songs at random to play created a pretty good music listening experience. Today, however, we don’t have 1,000 songs in our pocket. With music services like Rdio, Rhapsody or Spotify, we are walking around with millions of songs in our pocket. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to use Shuffle Play when you have millions of songs to shuffle through. Would it be a totally horrible listening experience listening to artists that are so far down the long tail that they don’t even know that they are part of a dog? Would you suffer from terminal iPod whiplash as you are jerked between Japanese teen pop and a John Philip Sousa march?

To answer these questions, I built an app called Million Song Shuffle. This app will create a playlist by randomly selecting songs from a pool of many millions of songs. It draws from the Rdio collection and if you are an Rdio user you can hear listen to the full tracks.

The app also takes advantage of a nifty new set of data returned by the Echo Nest API. It shows you the absolute hotttnesss rank for the song and the artist, so you will always know how deep you are into the long tail (answer: almost always, very deep).

So how is listening to millions of songs at random? Surprisingly, it’s not too bad. The playlist certainly gets a high score for eclecticism and surprise, and most of the time the music is quite listenable. But give it a try, and form your own opinion.

Its fun, too, to see how long you can listen to the Million Song Shuffle before you encounter a song or even an artist that you’ve heard of before. If the artist is not in the top 5K artists, it is likely you’ve never heard of them. After listening to Million Song Shuffle for a little while you start to get an idea of how much music there is out there. There’s a lot.

For the ultimate eclectic music listening experience, try the Million Song Shuffle.