Today's teenager is a savvy consumer of digital music and the constantly-evolving technology that plays it. Ask a typical student what they know about iTunes versus Pandora versus Spotify—most of them will have an opinion on the "best" service for listening to songs. This lesson links students' existing interest in music with the mathematical topics of frequency and relative frequency.

The activity assumes that students know what Shuffle Mode does when they listen to digital music. Shuffle Mode is a function on digital music players that "shuffles" or randomly rearranges the order of a list of songs. Each time a person presses Shuffle Mode, the playlist is rearranged. If we assume a music player's Shuffle Mode is truly random, the chances of any particular song being played would equal 1 divided by the total number of songs (1/total #). This is analogous to rolling a fair die; each number on the die has an equal probability of being rolled (1/6 or 16.7%).