Price vs. Length : How Much Are You Getting For Your Money?

1
Price vs. Length How Much Are You Getting For
Your Money?
Goal To compare runtime of a CD to its 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.
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

• Factors in collecting data
• How to sample
• Price

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.
avg. time avg.
cost Classical 3601.5
20.05 Popular 3189.8
16.44 Musicals 3702.1
21.28 Country 3589.8
14.88 Compilations 3425.7 16.36

• Times contained in the chart represent the
  average length of an album in each category in
  seconds.
• Prices are the average list price of cds in the
  sample.

• What does each category mean?
• Popular included albums from rb, 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 retailers 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)

Correlations (Pearson) Correlation of price (ms)
and Musicals -0.045, P-Value
0.902 Correlation of Popular and Price (p)
-0.094, P-Value 0.796 Correlation of Price (c)
and Classical -0.140, P-Value
0.699 Correlation of Compulations and Price (m)
0.403, P-Value 0.248 Correlation of price (cm)
and Country -0.009, P-Value 0.981
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.
Difference mu price (ms) - mu price
(cm) Estimate for difference 6.40 95 CI for
difference (3.82, 8.98) T-Test of difference 0
(vs not ) T-Value 5.23 P-Value 0.000 DF
17 I did however find that the difference in
price between the musicals and country music was
statistically significant