I enjoy a variety of music
genres
including
many types of rock, pop, soul, country and folk, as well as classical
and jazz
(though I don't usually use iTunes for the last two). The
first link below opens an Excel 2013 (.xlsx) file that contains the
complete playlist from my copy
of iTunes; click on the thumbnails to see images of summary charts
(they're also available on separate worksheets in the Excel file). All
the tracks themselves were acquired legally, mostly from purchased CDs;
I usually
download a random subset of the tracks onto my iPhone and use the
shuffle
feature.
The data
serve as an example for discussions in my research methods courses
about the limitations of quantitative data and charts - although the
spreadsheet and images provide a general sense of my musical
preferences, there are a great many factors that create false
impressions (e.g., errors and omissions in the iTunes database and data
encoded in CDs, the roles of variations in the availability and cost of
music products, the duration of artists' careers and ebbs and flows in
quality of their creative output, etc.).
In case
you want to create your own spreadsheet and charts, there are
step-by-step instructions in the Word (.doc) file here.
