Patent ID: 7788586

Claim:
A method comprising: providing a library having a plurality of library content items; generating a pool of content items by applying one or more user-selected filtering criteria to the library content items to filter these down into said pool of content items; accessing metadata associated with one or more content items in said pool of content items; selecting, randomly or pseudo-randomly, a plurality of playback content items for which the accessed metadata is evaluated and meets a selection criterion; selecting said content items within multiple clusters of content items in which each said cluster has a characteristic matching one or more specified criteria; and wherein content items in each of said multiple clusters are placed proximal one another within the generated list; storing content items in a list of selected media content items; wherein the content items are clustered into one or more clusters of content items by a characteristic selected from the group of characteristics consisting of artist, album and genre; and wherein each of said clusters is defined by probability values, including probabilities of greater than 0 percent and less than 100 percent, distributed across the list positions spanned by the cluster which have a specified probability of the characteristic matching one or more specified criterion.