Mar 7 2020 - How Many Songs?

How many songs are published?   Answering how many books in the world is easy - pops up right away - around 130,000,000 books, although that's an estimate. Books have always been at the centre of our intellectual universe. Songs, it turns out,  are in many libraries - streaming service libraries. For example, Gracenote is a company that stores and organizes songs.  It says it has 2,451 genres, 438 style descriptors, 480 languages.  It has a database of approximately 100 million tracks.  But it isn't the biggest - there is Discogs and their database is 151,200,000 tracks.  There are 40,000 tracks per day added to Spotify. Here are the streaming music service library sizes are: Apple - 45 million tracks Spotify - 35 million tracks Amazon Prime Music - 16 million tracks Google Play - 40 million tracks Pandora - 30 million tracks Tidal - 50 million tracks We could go to the Choral Public Domain Library, founded in 1998.  It is focused on choral and vocal music in the public domain.  There are 34,152 scores by more than 3,419 composers. Sometimes Quora has the answer.  It has interesting answers that show creative perspectives, but it has silly posts too.  I guess these guys are having fun and making money.  So who should complain?  Here are some of their posts: Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth is 70.5 which means you will have 25,732.5 (70.5 × 365 ) days to enjoy your songs, which means you will have 617,580 (25,732.5 × 24) hours to enjoy all your songs, which means you will have 37,054,800 (617,580 × 60) minutes to enjoy your songs. assuming a song to be average of 4 minutes totally, you will have the exact time to hear 92,63,700 songs in your lifetime. so friend i cannot say exactly how many songs are there in this world but what seems more relevant question is to how many songs can you hear in your lifetime. I can't say the exact digits. But Lets think like this. There is roughly 7,000,000,000 people in Earth. (just googled). So lets think 5% are musicians (assumption). Then the answer is 350,000,000. Now lets assume they have release an avg of 250 songs. Then it would be 87,500,000,000 songs. Could be more and I only considered the recent time period. According to what I was able to research, as of 1/5/2011 there have been 623,162,727 songs written with a new song being written every two minutes. So plus that number every 2 minutes that passes by... We move to Daylight Savings at 3:00am on March 8th, so we're celebrating spring with some tulips today.

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Feb 12 is Dozen Day

We're at the 12th of February and "A Dozen a Day" pops up on google.  This is a series of books by Edna Mae Burnam for learning piano. I would expect this series is in the Library of Congress - the centre of the library universe: The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world.  It is the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.  How old is the Library? It was founded in 1800.  When the British troops burned the Capitol building in 1814, they destroyed 3,000 volumes.  Today there are more than 164 million items - 838 miles of bookshelves.   Can you imagine receiving 15,000 items each working day? And they add 12,000 items to the collections daily.  They come through the copyright registration process.  What is the purpose of having the largest historical collection of U.S. telephone (criss-cross) directories and city directories in the world? I would think it is related to genealogy.  What do you think? One of the facts in the wikipedia entry on printed telephone directories is that the manufacture and distribution of telephone directories produces over 1,400,000 metric tons of greenhouses gases and consumes over 6,00,000 tons of paper annually. The telephone book has sa special role in popular culture - the Guinness Work Record for ripping the most phone books within a specific time period (3 minutes) is 21 books for females, and 56 books for males. Find out more fascinating facts about the Library of Congress HERE.

Lots of Land

Besides the larger retail malls, there seems to be larger house lots in the U.S. as well.  I observe that there seems to be more quasi-rural living, where people seem to be in rural settings, and commute to the city for work. As we drive around the Philadelphia area, that is the impression one has. I found an article by Moya K. Mason that looked at house sizes over the last few centuries.  In the 1800s a large home ranged between 2200 and 2800 square feet.  That's the size of suburban American and Australian homes today. In terms of lot sizes, these seem to be shrinking since 1990 in the U.S. where the average size of a house is increasing and its lot is decreasing.  Reports have the size between 12,870 square feet and 15,456 square feet or .35 acres. There doesn't seem to be any information for Canada to make a comparison, so I guess my anecdotal experience will have to do for now. Here are two scenes from a building on the grounds of the Hagley Library, in Wilmington, Delaware.