Or any Shuffle-like feature on an MP3 or other personal music player.
My iPod really likes John Denver, for some reason, and keeps selecting Denver songs for me on Shuffle even though I only have four or five of his songs out of 1,100+ tunes.
I like David Byrne, but whittled him down over time to a few favorite songs (maybe 10 out of over 5000 songs on my ipod)…which my iPod was still obsessed with playing. I removed all of the Byrne songs eventually just to keep them from being played…I swear I can still hear the ghost of them in the silences between tracks.
My player on my work computer has an unreasonable fondness for the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. If it doesn’t stop soon, I’m going to delete it. My ipod shuffle does not seem to be playing favorites, but then I don’t usually listen to it every day or for nearly as long.
My Pod has an unnatural urge to play Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople. There are just so many times I can tolerate listening to “Standin’ In My Light”.
It also went through a phase of wanting to hear the Beatles’ “Martha My Dear” over and over, but it seems to have relented on that.
On the other hand, there are things it never selects, probably because it is too appalled that I downloaded them (i.e. Tommy and the Shondells, the Fortunes and KC & The Sunshine Band).
I know, Apple, the shuffle is supposed to be completely random, but you can’t tell me there isn’t some microcircuited gnome in there picking the stuff it wants and thinks I should hear more often. Also, the most popular songs on a given album come up more frequently than the others, too often for this to be coincidence.
My iPod plays a lot of Morcheeba and AC/DC on it. More AC/DC than the other, but I guess it would since we have just about every single one of their albums.
Apple engineers have sworn up one side and down the other that the iPod Shuffle algorithm is truly random, and that people just tend to notice the songs they don’t like as much. Others are unconvinced…
I swear to God, though, Pandora will not stop playing “We Like to Party” by the Vengaboys, “I See Right Through to You” by DJ Encore, and “Sunrise” by Angel City. It’s very annoying.
I have a playlist called “Best Damn Playlist” which is basically a list of 300 songs that are pretty much my favorites from the whole iPod. I sneaked in a couple of full albums so that’d they’d get some rotation and I’d learn to like them in between all of the songs. No matter what, my iPod loves to break out Mumford and Sons as well as every single song with an annoying start from Neutral Milk Hotel’s On Avery Island album (spoiler, just about every single song on the album has an annoying start). I eventually took Mumford off the list entirely and pruned down the Avery Island tracks and the iPod still loves to play the Avery Island songs that are still around.
My Windows Media Player seems to like Ke$ha a lot. Of course, it helps that over 10% of the songs on there are by Ke$ha, and I have it programmed to play any given Ke$ha song thrice as often as any other given song.