Each year, the local classic rock radio station (100.7 KSLX) spends the last couple weeks of the year playing their catalog A to Z by song title. A couple years ago I decided to use that information to analyze the frequency of different artists in their catalog. I did have to clean the data for artist names that were inconsistent (e.g., "The Rolling Stones", "Rolling Stones", and in one case "Rolling Sones"), and I also made some choices to combine artist (e.g., I decided "Paul McCartney", "Paul McCartney and Wings", and "Wings" would count as a single "artist").
Anyway, I hope this analysis amuses someone else in this subreddit lol. If I understood today's afternoon dj correctly, there's a bunch of songs this year that will be new to their "A to Z", so I'll have to redo my analysis to look for differences in the dataset!
I have absolutely nothing I can do with this information, but I am impressed as you assembling. I always love people chasing their jams. Nice work.
information is the highest form of art
Some years ago (and by years, I mean decades fuck), KSLX played the entire Beatles discography A-Z. That was a wild ride, but more importantly that's exactly why I'll win the trivia night when the answer to the question is "You've got to hide your love away."
I feel like there's much more interesting info here that you could extract. # of songs per artist starting with a certain letter isn't very interesting or meaningful. What I would rather see: most popular release years, most popular artists, artist popularity over time, analysis of metadata of which versions of a track are being played on the radio
That would be interesting but I don't have the data needed to answer those questions. I used the "recently played" feature on the website during the A to Z period, and that only includes title and artist. If a more robust data set exists somewhere, then I agree those trends would be more meaningful. This analysis was more about amusement than being an in-depth research project.
If you DM me just the songs and artists, I’d put together at least the release years! I can guess where the “most represented” lies, but I’d be curious to see.
Edit: never mind, just saw you linked the spreadsheet below!
This is the kind of thing I feel like i would have done, seeing as I listen to morning radio here in Phoenix everyday at work on a variety of stations.
Unfortunately, lately weve been listening to hot 97.5 with Smasher, a morning show that seems like someone asked ChatGPT to make a morning show that was nom-offensive to everyone, yet also unlistenable to anyone.
The only stats I've been compiling are how we hear the same songs at nearly the exact same times on a near daily basis. And that's only out of pure boredom, your chat is awesome.
Yeah I can't stand any of the morning shows. The new(ish) one on KSLX isn't great IMHO.
I agree, they really, REALLY like to talk and not play music.
You’re supposed to be working, aren’t you.
Where's Queen? They seem to play loads of Queen (which isn't a bad thing, just an observation). Excellent work! I wanted to do something like this for KUPD, but mostly because I made the observation to one of their morning guys (Dick Toledo) that they seem to play the same 15 artists (different songs, same artists) on a loop. He didn't like that.
Last year I scraped their website to get the A to Z to create a YouTube playlist. They did some weird things like they didn’t play “A Day in the Life” first and left out some songs I was expecting. I got a count of 1073 but I might run it again just to see what’s changed. I don’t know why I care, given that I stopped listening to KSLX after Mark and Neanderpaul left.
Interesting! I did this maybe 2-3 years ago, so I'm not sure if anything changed in what was played, and I could have made a mistake. I pulled the song list by scrolling through the "recently played" list once per day and copy/pasting the data (I didn't know how to write a web scraper at the time). If you're interested to see the song list, here's the spreadsheet that I made to generate the analysis.
Led Zeppelin has 72 songs in their rotation? thats pretty much all of them.. I suppose "get the led out" leads to that.
If they have more than 72 songs, i wonder which ones are missing.
Led Zeppelin were an English rock band who recorded 94 songs between 1968 and 1980.
They play nirvana now and it makes me feel old
I'd like to see the data for Zeptember
I am a radio guy. This is cool. 1000 songs compared like 400 songs on a more tighter classic hits playlist like 94.5. I would make the data more like numbers oriented like the songs played with title, artist/band and the year the song came out. You can create how often each song, year, and artist. Radio people use Mediabase to get access to playlists. You get to see the stations trends the would be more interesting to an average joe. If you do your data analysis this way, you will see a trend that you will not like to hear for the future of classic rock format.