Well, I’ve now listened to my 90,000th song. In iTunes, at least. Who knows how many songs I’ve heard in my entire life? But one of the things which has always attracted me to the iTunes paradigm is the ability to not only have the inherent song information — who sang it? on what album? and when? — but also those extrinsic factors such as my own rating, when I got that song, and how many times — or if — I’ve ever listened to it. And armed with that … knowledge? information? distracting factoid? … we’ll go with information… armed with that information, I can say that I have listened to 90,000 individual songs (tracks? instances?) as of 5:30 PST on January 20, 2016. For those keeping score at home, the 90,000th track was a seventeen-and-a-half minute version of “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds, performed at a concert in the Curtis Hixon Hall in Tampa, Florida, on November 1, 1972. Actually, the track was over thirteen minutes of jamming by the band, followed by the familiar song. The bootleg itself is rather middling, as the vocals don’t come through all that well, but that makes an extended jam all the better in this case. The information from iTunes doesn’t stop at the song count (or “items” as iTunes calls them, which is not-just-technically more accurate); I also know — if such data constitutes ‘knowledge’ — that the songs I’ve listened to represent 574.44 GB of data on the hard drive where these songs are stored, and that the total time of these individual tracks (if laid end to end along a straight aural railway track through the temporal dimension) is equal to two hundred and forty-one days, nineteen hours, twenty-four minutes and sixteen seconds. The latter sounds like a lot of time, but is still less than two-thirds of a full year.
It’ll take the rest of that year and then some to finish all the songs I have, however, as I also know how much ‘music’ (I’ve often been told that much of what I listen to should not be considered as music, so consider the previous marks as warning quotes) I have not yet heard (though this shall change). Just after finishing the forty-odd-year-old version of “Eight Miles High”, I had 81,934 unheard ‘items’, comprising 516.41 GB of data, with a total listening time of two hundred and thirty-four days, nine hours, fifty-four minutes and a single second. Using the syntax favored by iTunes, the listened-to-unlistened time looks like this: 241:19:24:16 – 234:09:54:01
Does any of this matter? My reply, does anything? doesn’t really further the conversation of the ancients. I could point out the fuzziness inherent in the seemingly precise numbers proffered earlier — could note, for instance, that GB is one of those measures that has a very specific meaning, but which seems to change depending upon whether you’re looking at a Mac or PC, whether you’re buying or selling, and that factors of two are really most useful for looking for prime numbers. (Congratulations! by the way, to the GIMPS team, which just today announced a new Mersenne prime of ridiculous size. Keep adding to human knowledge, you crazy rascals you!) But the fuzziness is … deeper? fuzzier? more opaque? … than that. For example, the whole question about ‘songs’, ‘items’, ‘tracks’ alluded to above hides several other issues. To be sure, each of the enumerated ‘things’ are a single ‘item’ in my iTunes ‘Library’. These include music videos and podcasts in the present iteration of these ‘Smart Playlists’, but not movies or TV shows. A podcast of cartoons, however, is included in this accounting. History has been eliminated by the instantaneous algorithm, as well, as any ‘tracks’ which were listened to buy since deleted from my collection do not — of course — appear in the rendered accounting. Nor are duplicates removed from that list; though I do try to prune those for the most part, if a song appears on a Beatles album and then a 60s pop collection, it counts as two songs. Contrariwise, each song is counted only once, though many songs have been listened to multiple times.
Even here, however, more data is available to us. Of the 90,000 listened to ‘items’, 73,758 have only been listened to once. (One of these singletons is “Take On Me” by a-ha — though another instance has been listened to multiple times, so it’s a wash…) These represent over 200 days of time, and 484.55 GB of data. What does it all mean? Well, nothing, of course. Enumeration is a sin against creation, if enumeration is the only point. Why play the High Fidelity game at all, and decree that “Red House” by Jimi Hendrix is better than “Dies Irae” by Mozart, when each is a fiery brand held up against the darkness which surrounds us all? Each flame of human creation — but which version, which recording, and can recording recreate the flood of emotion sweeping us up and then down as the raging river of sound sends us through the tunnel of being into… what? Another mixed metaphor? Or a flaming flood of meaningless travail?
I have reported, or noted, or whatever this is, iTunes passages before. When I reached the halfway point — in ‘items’, in time, in data. And I very much doubt that I will not do so again. But I have no illusion that such ‘events’ are any more meaningful than an achievement unlocked in a mobile game which will be unsupported a mere three years from now, after who knows how many upgrades to OS or versions. And yet, I record here this numeric milestone, as a scratched tally against the darkness, although these bits and bytes themselves will fail, carved into a ‘cloud’ like a final confession in Word 3.x on a dusty floppy disk lost behind a workbay partition. Excelsior.