Markup View

Author: tardigrade

Nov 5th 2012 at 9:08:27 AM

@Crane: OK, so your claim is that the first track is a single more often than one would expect by chance. I'm not arguing that this is not true, I'm merely saying that it's not obviously true, to me. The proper way of demonstrating that it is true is not to list hundreds of examples (because we would expect *thousands* of examples to arise by chance alone), but rather to generate a random sample (perhaps only a few tens of albums, depending upon how strong you believe this effect to be) and see if there is a significant first-track effect.

@Folamh3: Yes, I understand the difference between tropes and norms. The majority of first tracks might not be singles, and yet there could still be a statistical effect whereby first tracks are more likely to be singles. My point is that some first tracks are expected to be singles by chance alone, it is not clear to me that there is a real first-track effect, and that the present method of simply listing positive examples is not at all convincing. To draw an analogy, "People Sit On Chairs" is not a trope. "Women Sit On Chairs" is not a trope, irrespective of how many examples we can come up with of women sitting on chairs across a variety of media, unless we can show that there's a tendency for women rather than men to be sitting on chairs.