I can only assume that the order of songs on a CD is carefully thought out. I often think about this when I listen to a CD, "is this the best order of music?", "if I could re-sort the order of music, how would I do it?".

As I thought those thoughts, I developed a theory that I tended to like the songs at the end of a CD we "better". The tracks at the start of a CD are usually the popular mainstream songs, and I often find myself tired of those types of songs. I enjoy the tracks at the end of Moby's "Play" more than the tracks at the end.

I realized today that I have a lot of usage data in iTunes, so I decided to find out if my theory was correct.

I created a Smart Playlist in iTunes which had all songs rated better than two stars. I sorted the results by track number, exported the playlist as a text file, used some cut/grep/uniq magic and put the results in an Open Office document.

When I was done, I found out that my theory was totally wrong. I tend to like the tracks at the beginning of a CD better than tracks at the end. The numbers can't lie!

 

(source document)

Also, I just looked at the statistics on "Play" by Moby - I've listened to the songs at the start of the CD more than the songs at the end. Crazy.