Dear Nexians,

Are you nerdy enough? I am quite, but not the full on nerd who is required to do this maths problem.

I pose a question.

How long would it take to listen to all the music ever made? [physically recorded onto vinyl/cd/dat/minidisc/mp3/aac/etc.]

Statisticians around the world should be getting wet, especially raving ones!

Classical Fermi problem.

Make some educated guesses

Lets assume the average song is 5 minutes (not accounting statistical outliers like the live version of Free Bird). We'll use the closest order of magnitude so we'll call it 10 minutes.

While the Rolling stones are prolific produces and had around 300 songs, some artists were less so. So lets split the mean and say the average artist/group will put out 8 albums of 10 songs. So we'll say 100 songs. (closest magnitude! and pul the numbers out of wherever you want)

How many artists are there? And who do we count as an artist with a recording? Because I've got a hilarious little diddy some friends and I made about a certain bodily function spurred on by too much coffee. we'll say there's. We'll stick to actual music houses and assume they sign on 1,000 artists per year.

Aaaannnd I would assume that it gets pretty difficult to find recordings beyond a 100 years ago. So that comes out to 10^8 minutes or 190 years. This result boggles at first, and we might argue that in 1915 there weren't 1,000 active artists getting recorded. However today, it's quite easy for fools such as my friends and I to record "The Coffee Pot Runs", or local bands to upload their productions to youtube or soundcloud. Furthermore when you realize that youtube has more than 300 hours of video uploaded to it every minute, this result starts to make some sense.

The point being made that recording media is so cheap now that everyone can participate with such low entry costs that music is more than likely being produced all over the world at a rate far faster than any individual (or even coordinated group of individuals) could ever listen to in their lifetime even listening to more than one track at a time.

The problem with most of the assumptions you make, OrionFyre, is that the generalizations you are making are for commercial music, which comprises a surprisingly narrow scope of all the music made. In any case, I don't think this question is for a math geek. I think it's nowhere near answerable. I think a more reasonable task would be to figure out all the vinyls made. When you start getting into CD's, mp3s and the like, then there is the complication of burning and how that could never be reasonably tracked and accounted for. Furthermore nowadays artists release their music in such a variety of formats through such a variety of different kinds of outlets, that no trustable averages could be derived.

Probly about the same amount of time that it would take your materialistic atheist to reincarnate.

I don't think you're understanding exactly what the nature of these types of problems are. The goal in these types of problems is to determine the order of magnitude and domain that the real answers lie within. It is then with this result that you can begin to make various assumptions about the real answer.

The assumptions I made during the math point to a domain of music that contains more minutes than there are in a year. I then draw the conclusion that since recording medium is so low and the entry costs to recording are just as low that the rate at which the colume of material exists is increasing at an exponential rate.

The problem with these types of problems is first the magnitude of the information/data that must be considered, and the domain qualifiers that must be considered as well. The 190 years figure I came up with is not an "ANSWER" but a magnitude. A magnitude that is far bigger than any human could possibly listen too in their lifetime. It is from that guess that I then used to draw conclusions.

p.s. I knew this problem sounded familiar: Vsauce had a nice video about music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw