I think it's a good unit of comparison. Virtually everyone has listened to a song to completion, and a very large number of people have done so in the past 24 hours, or even hour. It's also much easier to quantify the length of a song. Whereas with books: well, it's been a couple months at least since I've finished a new book. And number of pages in a book is not as meaningful to the human experience as amount of time. And the amount of time spent on a book -- i.e. minute per page -- greatly varies per human.

Sure, according to who you ask, a 3-minute Justin Bieber song contains less "data" than a 3-minute Bob Dylan song, but at least the quantifying of time is consistent among different people (um, relatively speaking).

And sure, 26 million songs is still as hard to comprehend as 26 million books. But again, more people can quantify how much of their life a song takes because most people have more recently consumed a song's worth of information.

The variance between data storage for song (e.g. length, kbps) is not meaningfully different enough in terms of order of magnitude.

Raw studio-quality audio and highly compressed mp3s are multiple orders of magnitude apart.

To insinuate that the average user is using uncompressed audio is being obtuse. The social context for the measurement by song came from iPod like devices based on the average 1MB per minute of audio MP3/MP4.

Raw is 10MB Loseless compressed is 5

Everyone using "songs" as a metric is talking about 1MB per minute MP3.

And punk rock songs and prog songs can be an order of magnitude apart in length.

When the average reader has to store/port songs in bulk, which of those formats are they using?

An unknown quantity somewhere in the middle.

A “song” is about 4-10MB. Good enough for a colloquial point of reference.

Why is the choice books or songs?

There was a time something of the sort would be needed for the popular audience - but contemporary 'normal people' well understand the usual measures of digital storage.

People don't choose between the '3,000 song' & '6,000 song' iPhone variations - even though Apple previously offered this comparison much more prominently for its iPod range. They choose 8/16/32/64/128 GB (the modern public is even catching up with us in having the powers of 2 memorised!) or whatever is the current lineup.

That's probably got more to do with the prevalence of streaming services. Very few people keep all their music on their portable devices anymore.

It doesn't matter what the cause is - I'm saying as a result of that, the general populus understands gigabytes.

I don't think they do, because family members ask me if they need to replace a 500GB hard drive with a bigger one when it's all Excel and Quicken.

I personally prefer the more correct "library of congress" units of measurements.

why? for those who know how big a song is, you can easily translate. for those who have no idea but roughly know how many songs their music players can hold it is a far more meaningful measure than units of 'bit'

Are we talking 2-minute punk songs, 4-minute pop songs, or 20-minute jazz-prog odysseys? And is this CD quality wav, or 128 kbps mp3?

4 minutes. A typical length for a song.

And for those like me, who don't know either of those things, can you please translate into bytes?

about 5 megs.

So 130TB.

Was it really easier for them to say 26 million songs?

Not easier, just more meaningful to more people.

Yes, keep the old trend and standardize on a certain symphony.