To me, the albums represent the Fourier Transform or frequency response of the DT awesomeness in the time domain. A 4th Order Lowpass filter has been applied, with the corner frequency at w0 = Octavarium (5858hz). This would mean that the awesomeness of the albums after Octavarium decays at 24db per octave. This of course doesn't tell us much about the change in popularity over time for each album.
This doesn't make any sense. The only thing you will get out of a Fourier Transform of DT's awesomeness over time is maybe a peak around F = 1.585×10^-8 Hz (which is about 2 years) and maybe some other high values in that area. Higher frequencies will in comparison be neglectible, and thus a lowpass filter will be useless.
You're right, of course, I was just being poetic. DT isn't even a a periodic fuction to take a DFT of.
What I was trying to envision is the albums spread across the spectrum at frequencies relevant to their release times. Then if you put a window function with the shape of a lowpass filter's frequency response to that, the newer albums would be attenuated.
Then again, it's a perfect sphere colliding with our fate... and the signal ends where it began. Hey maybe DT hid something in it's own popularity spectrogram. NUGGETZ.