What's your MP3 player say about you?

The New York Times had an interesting article about MP3 players and their owners today. In a telephone poll of American digital music player owners, 50% of them store fewer than 100 songs on their players. The average device, the survey found, was loaded with 375 songs.

"It's not just music players," said Kaan Yigit, the president of Solutions Research. "The storage capacity of most digital devices today far exceeds what we know people do with them."

Partly because of the higher storage capacity of most iPods, Mr. Yigit said, owners of those devices carry an average of 504 songs. iPod owners surveyed, he added, tend to have substantially higher household incomes, buy more music both online and on CD's and tend to be older than people who use other brands of players.

The telephone survey of 1,062 adults was conducted in May and June. The growing number of lower-price, and lower-capacity, iPod shuffles shipped since then may have somewhat altered the market, Mr. Yigit acknowledged. Also, the survey does not account for other things that may be stored in the devices, such as digital photo files.

Among the 1,062 people surveyed, it appears that iPod owners have more varied musical tastes. Mr. Yigit said that they were four times as likely as non-iPod users to listen to various kinds of music. There is, however, one glaring exception.

"Very few of them identified country as their favorite music," said Mr. Yigit.

Read the entire article here.