US Patent 9164996 Rules based playlist generation

A playlist can be generated based on a chart or list including ranked media items, e.g. songs, videos, etc., by automatically including the highest ranked media items to the playlist, but only adding some of the lower ranked media items to the playlist. A particular lower-ranked media item can be pseudo-randomly excluded from the playlist if that media item has a ranking in a current version of the chart that is lower than its ranking in a previous version. Once the desired number of media items has been added to an intermediate list, the intermediate list can be inverted, and station identifiers can be interspersed between the media items.