Adding play count

December 11, 2007 9:42 AM

How about adding a play count to songs in the black?

It may have been requested before, but it would be nice to see how many times a song has been played not just "playlisted".

posted by Black_Umbrella to Feature Requests at 9:42 AM (21 comments total)

It's a pain in the ass to do -- it'd require some custom flash programming (which no one I know does) to ping the server every time someone pushes play.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:43 AM on December 11, 2007

fair enough
posted by Black_Umbrella at 9:59 AM on December 11, 2007

Man, it's weird to think of Music as "the black."
posted by dismas at 10:08 AM on December 11, 2007

I like calling it the black. Come over to the dark side, won't you?
posted by cashman at 10:19 AM on December 11, 2007

"Burn the land and boil the sea, still can't take the sky from me."
posted by [@I][:+:][@I] at 10:28 AM on December 11, 2007 [2 favorites]

A few theme songs come to mind for the black
posted by Black_Umbrella at 10:33 AM on December 11, 2007

No power in the verse can track play count.
posted by Plutor at 10:33 AM on December 11, 2007

Well, supposedly the JW player is scriptable, but hell if I could get it to work last time I tried. It ought to be possible with a small piece of Javascript that posts back when it starts to play a song and something server-side to receive it, though, no Flash required.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:53 AM on December 11, 2007

once you go black, you don't go back.
posted by Stynxno at 11:02 AM on December 11, 2007

MefiMusic, whats with the black? You look like you're goin' to a funeral!


Maybe I am.
posted by rooftop secrets at 11:04 AM on December 11, 2007

I thought the time elapsed/time remaining counter under the play bar was kinda slick when Music first started but then it seemed like it was gone soon after. Still there in playlists--or maybe it was only ever in playlists and I'm mis-remembering.
posted by chococat at 11:32 AM on December 11, 2007

Is there a way to only count a play once the player has reached the end of the file? Or perhaps the middle? I push play on a lot of the songs but I don't listen to all of them all the way through.
posted by chillmost at 1:11 PM on December 11, 2007

The big question for me on the number-of-plays question is "why?". Answers that have come up before and which don't seem particularly compelling to me include:

1. So then we'd know how many times a song got played.
2. So we can tell what's popular.
3. So people will know folks are listening to their recordings.
4. Because.

The first one is pretty neutral, but I want to come back with "yeah, but why?"

The second seems off the mark; we've got favorites and comments and playlists and podcast inclusions and the sidebar and metatalk and general word of mouth and Flagged As Fantastic all working together as a collective, quantitative valuation, and I don't see what plays-as-popularity has to offer beyond that that makes it exciting data. And I get excited about (a) Music, and (b) data, so that's saying something coming from me.

The third thing is like the second in a lot of respects; and where it differs is, I think, the aspect of that that translates to a more general want: it'd be nice if more people were listening and commenting over at Music. I'm all over that, and we're slowly making efforts here and there to try and help that out (ideas come up in Metatalk fairly often, too), but a play counter isn't going to help.

The fourth thing is maybe not a great reason, but it does seem to come up.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:19 PM on December 11, 2007

I see a Metafilter subsite, and I want to paint it black...
posted by dismas at 1:38 PM on December 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

I had never seen the time elapsed counter in the playlists until now, and it looks great. That's something that could be handy to have at every player, sometime people who leave comments say things like "I love the sound of the cat meowing at 2:14" or "everything sounds perfect, but the synth sounds off key at 5:43." To do that, right now they have to download the song and listen to it in their own desktop player, is this something that would be easy to implement?
posted by micayetoca at 2:02 PM on December 11, 2007

Oh yes, micayetoca, that's a great suggestion, for the very reason you've given. I often post comments to MeFiMu that go into pretty specific detail, and an elapsed time counter on every player would be really helpful. I'm all for this in a big way.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:10 PM on December 11, 2007

cortex,

1. Lets say i post three songs...the problem is that if someone likes that style of music they probably would playlist them all. which tells me nothing of which song style they liked best. On the same note, the people who do playlist all three may not listen to all three equally. Again it would be nice to see which song/style is preferred.

3. Yes, that is true, people do not comment enough, so we could let the numbers speak for themselves.

4. Just because is right! I'm not trying to get into a philosophical argument over art for arts sake, etc. True its great to create just to create but its also nice to fulfill our ego's a bit and say, "wow, 5,000 plays, cool guys! Keep up the good work!" To me thats the ultimate compliment, consider play count as the applause where playlisted are the groupies.

I am also a little curious just to see what genres the mefi community listens to the most.
posted by Black_Umbrella at 5:50 PM on December 11, 2007

I think a little mystery can be a good thing. I'm not sure it'd be so great to have "number of plays" at MeFiMu, since it's a multi-user site, with lots of contributions from lots of participants. There'd be that element of "How's ______ doing against _______?" or "How am I doing against _______?" which I don't think would be very healthy, actually.

Those who really want to see "number of plays" can always open a MySpace Music page and post some songs there, where a daily and a total tally of plays is a feature of the site.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:11 PM on December 11, 2007

Anything that knocks my song off the all time top ten (which I assume a play count would do as it wouldn't be retrospective,) is a VERY BAD THING.
posted by Jofus at 1:11 AM on December 12, 2007

Hey, the king may be gone, but he's not forgotten.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2007 [1 favorite]

I have to agree.
posted by micayetoca at 9:22 AM on December 12, 2007