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Size of the Average Music Library: 7,160 Songs

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The average TidySongs user has 7,160 songs in their music library. These people may not be your average music fan. That's clear. What's obvious is that these users likely didn't pay for a majority of these songs.

For the inundated, TidySongs operates like a music library nanny. It comes in and fills in your missing titles, artwork, and deletes song duplicates. It cleans things up.

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.

Here are some additional stats:

  • 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.

So what do we make of all this?

It's hard to say. What's notable first is that a 32GB iPod can hold about 8,000 songs. Therefore, it's somewhat ironic that the number of songs in the average TidySongs user's library matches so closely so Apple's most popular product.

Second, it's hard to argue that the iTunes business model of $1 a song reflects reality. There are many ways to go about getting 7,160 songs in your collection and most of them involve diligent torrenting. Well, and having a friend that also has 7,160 songs in their collection—that's a surefire way to fill up that lonely, empty iPod that you got for Christmas. That's still quite a few songs though.

After taking a glance inside 1 million people's music libraries over a two-year period—that's the number they came up with. Even if you religiously download from blogs, take up Amazon on their Daily Deal, and buy used music, getting a hold of that many songs legally is still an expensive undertaking. It takes time.

iTunes doesn't make sense to fans. Their libraries outgrow their wallets. And fast.

How many songs are in your library?

(Click picture to enlarge)

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