I did some analysis of the top rated music in my Itunes. I have had an Ipod for a little over a year now and have added about 5800 songs to it. Most are from CD, only about a hundred purchased from I tunes. I absolutely love my Ipod, I play it in the car (no more radio for me), I have a Bose player in my office and I listen to it on all my airplane trips. I think it is a great product. Anyway, back to the analysis. These are how my top rated looks by Genre:

Genre Number of Songs Hours
Jazz 331 38.5
World 150 15.4
Rock 141 13.4
Blues 77 6.6
Country 41 2.7
R&B 10 0.6
Reggae 2 0.2
Total 752 77.4

Jazz is understated as a lot of the Latin jazz shows up in world music. Country includes folk.

Here are the top 15 artists (by song count):

Artist Number of Songs Hours
Miles Davis 33 4.8
John Coltrane 26 2.7
Neil Young 23 2.1
Stan Getz 22 2.3
Roy Hargrove 18 1.9
Charlie Parker 15 1.2
Pink Floyd 13 2.2
Cal Tjader 12 0.9
Oscar Peterson 12 1.9
Sonny Rollins 12 1.3
Art Blakey 10 1.2
Bob Dylan 10 0.8
Poncho Sanchez 10 1
Tito Puente 10 1.1

What stuns me is how little of the music that I loved so much when I was younger makes to the top rated list. I suppose this is true for everyone. 20 years ago I could not have named a jazz musician and had no clue what was going on in world music. Only Neil Young, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan still come out on top. Some of the other bands from that time that are further down the list are Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Paul Butterfield and Boz Skaggs.

Canned Heat is interesting in that I was never a big fan growing up but have come to like them a lot in the last couple of years. I bought a blues compilation album that had a song of theirs called Bullfrog blues that is great. I then bought a 2 disk CD called Boogie House tapes that is also great.

I will have more to say about music later.