Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Radio experiment: results

I finished tracking 5 days' worth of songs on Saintjohnradio.fm. I wasn't able to catch every single song, nor was I able to write down all that I heard because there were some that I didn't recognize or couldn't google. Here are my findings:

Total number of songs tracked: 388
% of those songs which were CanCon: 44% (surprisingly lower than I thought)

Top played artists:
Pink Floyd 14
Rolling Stones 13
Led Zeppelin 13
Kim Mitchell 13
April Wine 12
Beatles 12
Bryan Adams 11
Rush 11
Tom Cochrane 10
Elton John 9
Blue Rodeo 8
ZZ Top 7


Most played songs:
Gimme All Your Lovin' by ZZ Top: 5 times
Just Between You and Me by April Wine: 4 times

Standing in the Dark Platinum Blonde 3
Magic Power Triumph 3
Try Blue Rodeo 3
Hey You Pink Floyd 3
New Orleans is Sinking Tragically Hip 3
Easy To Tame Kim Mitchell 3
Good Times Tom Cochrane 3
Eyes of a Stranger Payolas 3
Feel It Again Honeymoon Suite 3
Voodoo Thing Colin James 3
Nova Heart Spoons 3
Rockland Wonderland Kim Mitchell 3
I'm an adult now Pursuit of Happyness 3
Go For A Soda Kim Mitchell 3
Working for the Weekend Loverboy 3
Show Me The Way Peter Frampton 3
Someday Glass Tiger 3
Sinking like a sunset Tom Cochrane 3
Angel Eyes Jeff Healey Band 3
All Of My Love Led Zeppelin 3
Diamond Mine Blue Rodeo 3

With all of these artists, why in the heck didn't they play any: Queen -- not a single song by Queen all week. I did hear Another One Bites The Dust today, though.

Songs repeated during the same day:
Carry On My Wayward Son Kansas 12/12/08 2
Gimme All Your Lovin ZZ Top 12/12/08 2
The Joker Steve Miller 12/11/08 2
Time Pink Floyd 12/10/08 2
Try Blue Rodeo 12/11/08 2

Most ironic song: How Many More Times by Led Zeppelin

3 comments:

canadianicewolf said...

Wow! I definitely expected more CanCon.

An interesting result. Not as bad aas I expected with the number of repeated songs and most played songs.

Thanks for the experiment and results. I will keep listening when in the car :)

liz said...

That figure was quite low. It felt like every 2nd song that came on was CanCon, so I was expecting 50%. I didn't go into a close examination of CanCon, I just took the obvious ones, so there could be others that qualified.

I thought repeated songs and artists was as bad or worse than I expected. Though SJers do love their April Wine, why so heavy on them? I don't think ZZ Top's Gimme All Your Lovin' was such a big hit that it warranted daily airplay (only reached 37 on the Billboard Hot 100). I found it especially bad that they repeated songs during the same day -- with the range of years and artists their playlist covers, there should be no need of that on a non-Top 40 station.

canadianicewolf said...

That last statement is very true - there is no need for ANY station to repeat a song with the range of artists and years that they can choose from.

What's scarier is that I really only listen to the radio in the car and 98.9 has repeats in the same day when I'm only in the car a couple of minutes during the day and I hear the same song. That's just SAD!