Long Tail and Shuffle

The Long Tail 1/27/05 The case against the Shuffle
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/01/is_shuffle_anno.html

You can think of the thousands of songs on your hard drive as a Long Tail of sorts. Even though you've bought, ripped, or downloaded them all, they're not all your personal "hits". Some of those tracks are songs you don't care for on albums you otherwise like; others are albums you wish you hadn't bought or ripped in the first place. And yet others are songs that you've simply grown tired of. In other words, the signal-to-noise ratio in your own collection can be nearly as variable as that in any commercial music service.
The difference is that the commercial services provide recommendations, editors' picks, bestseller lists and collaborative filtering to suppress most of the junk. This is important: a key element in extracting value from any Long Tail is the ability to find the diamonds in the rough, which gets harder the further into the rough you go. In other words, a Long Tail without good filters is just noise.