Track Three Is The Best Song On The Album

On Math The Band's well known Imaginary Everything album they have a song called "The Very Best Song On The Whole Entire Album", which is track 3. The song is about how track 3 is often the best song on any album. In it he says, "Have you ever really actually taken a look at the songs you like on certain CDs? Look at the track numbers that they are, and usually, almost always, track number 3 is the best song on the album. Closely followed by 2, 7, and sometimes 12.".

The first time I heard this I wondered if this was true or not. I somewhat doubted it, as I thought of some of my favorite songs and what track they were. But I could never really be sure. I decided to take my playback statistics and find out. My statistics only cover about 6 months since the last time I reformatted. Out of 8268 songs there are 26,516 plays, an average of 3.2. There are 2350 songs which haven't been played, and 776 I don't have track numbers for, which are being discarded for this, raising the average to 4.83. 

The cutoff point was a problem.  In the chart I decided to cut off at track 26, since I have less than 10 songs with any track number above that.  There is a clear favoring for tracks above 12.  I think there are a number of reason for this.  First high track numbers are often from best of CDs.  Next they are indicative of short songs, which are more likely to be able to play enough to get counted.

There is another problem with using play counts as indicator of goodness.   In my media player (Foobar2000) when one album is done playing the next album starts playing.  The next album is usually the next album released by that band, but if it was their last album it'll be the first album by the next band in alphabetical order.  Thus if an album has a strong lead in album it'll get unrealistically high track counts, particularly the first couple tracks.  On the other hand, if an album is equally good throughout, the later track will be favored.  This is because I often hit random track to find good music, when a good song comes on I let it play in normal order until I want to hear something different.  This means that if an early track comes on in a CD that is good I'll likely listen to the whole thing, thus the later tracks will also get a play.  On the other hand, if a late track comes on the early tracks won't get played.

Let's look at what the data tells us.  There is more to be learned though from the lower track numbers.  First off track 3 is not in fact the best song on the album.  Even if we ignore the higher tracks, track 2 is solidly better.  Then there is a clear drop off for the middle of the album, and it picks up somewhat towards the end.

I've already explained the late tracks being high.  Track 1 being low is likely due to intros which tend to get skipped.  The question is whether there is an actual tendency for better songs at the start of the album, or if it's due to what I wrote above about how songs get played?  In summary we didn't really learn much, except that statistics are fun.

Track	Count	Average
1	589	4.88
2	601	4.98
3	583	4.93
4	556	4.78
5	535	4.55
6	508	4.52
7	481	4.55
8	466	4.67
9	434	4.73
10	394	4.67
11	327	4.64
12	256	4.98
13	210	5.14
14	156	5.21
15	126	4.99
16	101	5.64
17	76	5.6
18	65	6.06
19	53	5.07
20	44	4.89
21	32	5.52
22	29	5.73
23	25	6.58
24	21	6.23
25	15	6.11
26	14	5.89