Price vs. Length : How Much Are You Getting For Your Money? Goal: To compare runtime of a CD to it’s cost to see if there was a connection between how much music was on a disc and how much I was paying for it. I then used this data to see if the style of music had anything to do with these factors and if I was paying more because of the length or type of music. Factors in collecting data: How to sample Price About the data About the data: The sample was taken from the Billboard top selling albums list. Since prices change according to release time all albums used in the data sets have What does each category mean? Popular ~ included albums from r&b, alternative, and “pop” categories Classical ~ included instrumental art music only, vocal collections were not included since they could often be included in other categories. Country ~ included bluegrass, and country music, crossover performers where not included since albums were often included in multiple categories. Compilation CDs ~ included soundtracks and dance mixes where no one performer or group is featured. Also all items included in this group were American releases no imports. Musical Theater ~ Live only, no movie soundtracks. What about the price? Online shopping has its advantages but it can also be very misleading in terms of how much the consumer is actually spending. This being the case I chose to use the list price for each disc instead of an given retailer’s price (which were often quite a bit lower.) List prices are determined by the record labels and are the recommended price for which a disc should be sold by any given retailer. All albums were single discs ( no sets) avg. time avg. cost Classical Popular Musicals Country Compilations spent no less than 3 and no more than 15 weeks on the list in their category. Albums listed in more than one category were also skipped. The top 10 albums meeting these criteria were also included in the sample for each of the 5 categories; Popular, Classical, Country, Compilation Albums and Musical Theater soundtracks. From the data collected I found very little to suggest that price and length have anything to do with each other. Price had more to do with the category of the album than the length of it, musicals having the highest over all cost followed by classical. Some reasons for the price differences might be the cost of producing an orchestrated work since the number of performers tends to be higher it would make sense that the cost to the consumer would also be raised. Times contained in the chart represent the average length of an album in each category in seconds. Prices are the average list price of cd’s in the sample. Correlations (Pearson) Correlation of price (ms) and Musicals = , P-Value = Correlation of Popular and Price (p) = , P-Value = Correlation of Price (c) and Classical = , P-Value = Correlation of Compulations and Price (m) = 0.403, P-Value = Correlation of price (cm) and Country = , P-Value = Difference = mu price (ms) - mu price (cm) Estimate for difference: % CI for difference: (3.82, 8.98) T-Test of difference = 0 (vs not =): T-Value = 5.23 P-Value = DF = 17 I did however find that the difference in price between the musicals and country music was statistically significant