Wow. Quite the first post dp!
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Originally Posted by dp
I don't know why you think it's appropriate to add two tracks from the same artist to make the percentage better.
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Did you notice that I presented my findings as two distinct statistics? I did that on purpose. The first was based solely on eight unique artists from the Top 30 songs. That statistic stands alone.
The second experiment was simply seeing if two tracks, not from the Top 30, from the same album, had any different sort of sharing privileges on them. Of the two KT Tunstall songs I picked, one was her "hit single" and the other was a B-side (AFAIK). I wanted to see if tracks were DRM'd in different ways if one was a single and one was not. I do not believe my methodology is flawed - if you can point out how, I'm glad to listen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dp
These restrictions will clearly be on a per-artist basis. Clearly you don't want to spend money at the Marketplace, but it would be more telling to conduct this test further with only one track per artist.
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You're making a big assumption about the DRM limits being on a per-artist basis. What facts do you have to base that on? I've seen instances on MSN Music and even iTunes where they've sold the "hit single" as an individual download, but other tracks from the same album are available only as a whole-album download. Or the reverse: the song "Mad World" is hugely popular right now because of the Gears of War commercial - and on the Zune Marketplace it can only be purchased as part of a complete album download. So there's not necessarily a lot of logic at work here.
Now regarding me "not wanting to spend money" (which is clearly a dig), the only way I can purchase Zune Marketplace tracks is by using points purchased from Xbox Live points cards purchased at retail from stores in the United States. I'm in Canada, and the Xbox Live points purchased at retail here will not work. I had to register a new passport account just to be able to do this. And that means getting friends to buy the Xbox Live point cards for me, which is a hassle. As such, yes, I was limited in terms of how many songs I could purchase for this test. I need to keep some points in my account for other tests. I do believe, however, that purchasing 26% of the top 30 songs (8 of 30) is a reasonable sample size from which to draw some conclusions.
If you'd like to perform your own test with a much larger pool of songs, I'd definitely encourage it. In fact, it would be great to have as many people as possible do their own version of this test - especially those with Zune Pass accounts that could try this with 100+ songs.