During the years of using iTunes I’ve noticed that certain songs recur more frequently than others. Throwing out conspiracy theories that Apple has deals to secretly promote certain artists and/or songs by innocuously promoting them through shuffle, I figured it had to be something with the algorithm that controls what song plays next when you hit that shuffle button in your iTunes player.

The obvious first place I looked was iTunes’ preferences. There under the “playback” tab I found options for increasing or decreasing the likelihood of what iTunes dubs “Smart Shuffle,” which is basically the likelihood of hearing songs in a row by the same artist or from the same album. Since mine was set smack in the middle above “random,” this didn’t shed any light on why in the world certain specific songs were coming up more frequently than all the others.

Since Apple doesn’t provide their shuffle algorithm to the public, I resorted to doing what most people in my generation do when they have a question: I queried Google. After digging through some basic, obviously off-the-cuff answers provided in various forums and blog posts, I found what I thought would be a gold mine. The CNET article I ran across was titled, “iTunes: Just how random is random?” and attempted to address the very questions I was seeking to have answered. CNET detailed in the article the testing and data-gathering they did, but ended the elementary-at-best test very disappointingly by stating,

“Could this be a result of the relative popularity of each label’s artists, or is somebody conspiring to keep Sony’s numbers lower? Or is this just a natural manifestation of the known deficiencies in computers’ random-number algorithms?” It’s obviously difficult to tell whether back-room marketing deals or just dumb luck were responsible for the results we saw, but it appears that we can safely lend credence to the suspicions of myriad iPod users around the world. When it comes to choosing songs, ‘random’ clearly is relative.”

Thanks for that non-answer CNET. On top of that sad conclusion, I didn’t think CNET’s test was really that great because of how small the sample was and how many times they repeated the test (zero, to be precise). I didn’t really blame them since there are an exponential number of variables to take into account, but I was still disappointed not to have found a solid answer to my nagging question.

Regretfully, I have to conclude this post the same way CNET did their test – by telling you that I don’t have an answer. All I know is that it seems like I hear the same Nickel Creek song at least once every time I listen to my music library with shuffle turned on. Maybe I’ll just go back to convincing myself that since I listen to music so frequently while working on the computer that it only seems like I hear the same songs repeating in shuffle. That or Nickel Creek really has paid for a subliminal marketing campaign through Apple….