My iTunes Rating Blunder

Found a great article dealing with the math behind iTunes on Slashdot this morning. Specifically how the random selection works, and I'm very glad I read it. Unconsciously, I've been using the rating feature completely wrong. Who knew? From the article:

Most people follow a bell shaped curve for their ratings, with the 3-star rating being the most common.

I'm not sure this is true of most people. I certainly don't follow this pattern, I checked my wife's collection and its the same. The default in iTunes is unrated, which is how I thought of it, but in reality its more accurate to call it zero stars. The vast majority of my collection has zero stars. And here's where my problem lay, I've been assigning four and five star ratings occasionally to songs I liked and one and two star ratings to songs I didn't, and rarely at that. Little did I know that I was actually increasing the chances of the songs I didn't like to get played. Check out their figure 1, a song with one star is three times more likely to be played than a zero rated song.

The correct use, for the way I've been using this feature, would be to set everything to three stars, and assign four and five stars to the songs I like and zero, one, and two to the songs I don't. There really should be a preference setting so that any new songs I import get the three star rating automatically. Or at least an easy way to set three stars to all the currently unranked tracks wholesale.

Links:

1. How Much Does iTunes Like My Five-Star Songs? by Brian Hansen.
2. Slashdot via RSS.