I got a comment to a post that had nothing to do with iTunes. Whilst it wasn’t a particularly helpful or nice comment, I thought maybe I can answer the question I think he’s asking.
(Unless he’s talking about the iTunes Music Store counter that shows how many songs have been bought for the latest contest…).
Wach time you finish playing a song, the Play Count field is incremented, and the Last Played date is updated. If you skip a song before listening to the entire track, neither of these are updated. There are some scripts around for MacOS AppleScript that will update a Play Count and Last Played if you listen to more than a certain amount of a track. I could also add the same feature to iTunes Rater. But I don’t really use Play Count and Last Played that often, anyway.
I think this is one of the biggest “bugs” of the IPod/ITunes system is that it doesn’t keep accurate stats. If I listen to more than 1/2 a song, I think it should count as have being played. Wanting to keep accurate stats has changed my listening habits– listening to songs in their entireity where I usually would have skipped the last bit, etc.
2 days, 7 hours after the fact.