Radio Sucks

Radio programming is just that!

-- Saul Williams, "Penny for a Thought"

Radio sucks! The same fucking songs over and over again! All the weak ones, all that disposable crap that isn't gonna matter in 3 months, it's just shit!

-- Matt Pinfield, Significant Other hidden track

Turn on the radio, nah, fuck it, turn it off!

-- Rage Against the Machine, "Vietnow"

When I posted my analysis of The Current's playlist a while back, I mused about how it might stack up against a station run by the mainstream corporate borg that is ClearChannel. The problem is that no other stations make their full playlists publicly available, so I had no data to work from. Most of them offer the 10 most recent songs played, and that's it.

I dropped the idea for a while, but when I got myself a cheapo hosting plan, suddenly I had an always-on box that could, say, run a cron every ten minutes, perhaps a cron that scraped some radio sites for their recent songs. And even better, since every ClearChannel subsidiary uses the same template, I only had to build one scraper and I could collect data on half the music stations in the Twin Cities. Score! A little later, I discovered Yes.com, a cool service that even provides an API, and worked out a way to scrape the other major stations in Minneapolis.

The code is available here. The data you see below is the averages for the period of 3/22/09-5/22/09. If you'd like more discussion of my analysis techniques, check out my original post. Don't worry, this post will not contain any sad kitten pictures. Without further ado, the results:

I went into this expecting KDWB (Today's Best Music) to suck, and they did not disappoint. They come out swinging with an absolutely abysmal level of uniqueness per week - which only gets worse when we measure over a month. However, they're facing some heavy competition from KS95 (Variety...80's, 90's and Today!). Those people seem to be rather confused about what constitutes "variety." Apparently the 80s, 90s, and today just didn't have that much to offer.

Most of the other stations muddle along between 0.2 and 0.3 - not as bad as they could be, but if you've spent any significant amount of time listening to Cities 97, you'll know that's still bad enough to drive a person to murder.

There are a couple notable standouts at the week level - KQRS and Love 105 (the latest owners of what was once Rev105's signal) do respectably. And Jack FM, who brags constantly that they are Playing what we want!, actually beats the Current for uniqueness at the week level. All these stations suffer significantly in the month-long measurements. To me, it looks like these stations have fairly large playlists, but simply rotate the same playlist over and over again. This isn't entirely a bad trait, especially for KQRS (Minnesota's Classic Rock), who doesn't have a growing field to work with.

Still, this demonstrates to me the importance of not only playing good songs, but playing different songs. Sure, it's fun to sing along with "Dirty Deeds" once and a while. But we've been singing along with it for decades now. And yeah, it's quirky when JackFM plays The Bangles right after Linkin Park, but it's a quirkyness that's manufactured by CBS Radio and shipped out to countless identically-named stations nationwide, and I don't think I'm the only one who starts to notice the cracks in the veneer after a while. So, hooray for The Current! Hooray for quirkyness that's actually just Mary Lucia being wacky and saying whatever goes through her head. Yes, Mary, I was listening that one day when you suggested that Mark Wheat take up cocaine.

Interesting. You'll notice The Current is definitely not ahead in this race. Jack FM, KQRS, and Love 105 again all put up very impressive numbers, and KOOL 108 isn't bad either. It makes a fair amount of sense - these are the stations that are drawing from several decades of music and shying away from new releases. So they're not under pressure to spin the latest single that some manufactured star just released. Good for them.

The Current, of course, is still a long, long way from the real offenders here. KS95 again manages to compress three decades of music into playing one song almost 50 times per week. And B96 pulls out a surprise win over KDWB here, playing the top song for a given week roughly 85 times in that week. I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Radio sucks, people. It sucks, sucks, sucks. Some stations suck more than others, but I can't lionize anyone here. The best we can ask for in playlist variety, it seems, is mediocrity. Listen to WLTE, who's completely unremarkable in every degree. Or, listen to Rage. Turn it off. There is no guerilla radio. The war was lost to the strains of Howie Day's simpering falsetto.

Epilogue

I've got one last graph for you all because, well, I still have an agenda. Here's the uniqueness graph again, but with one new data point: values from The Current for the same two-month period in 2006 as opposed to 2009.

This is what I had hoped to see in the earlier charts. It's completely dwarfing the other stations. The scale is all off. It's not even worth debating how one conglomerate scores compared to the others, because The Current is embarrassing all of them. That's what it looks like when one station is single-handedly saving radio. That's where I want us to be.

89.3 The Current and the Mysterious Non-Expanding Playlist

Let me say this much up front: I still love The Current. I still have the dial on my car tuned there permanently, I still listen to the podcasts when I get a chance, I'm still a member. I'm saying this because the rest of this post is going to sound like Current-bashing. I still think it's a wonderful station - I just don't like the direction it feels we're heading.

A short primer: A few years back, a magical public radio station was born. It billed itself as "the antiformat" station, gave the DJs a massive amount of freedom, and played music that was always fresh, varied, and exciting (and usually quite good besides). Then, somewhere along the line, someone decreed that certain songs needed to get certain amounts of airtime. DJs started being told what their playlists should contain. One DJ quit over the issue. And people like me started wondering why the same song was playing every day on my 20-minute commute. Not that it's a bad song, just... I don't need to hear it every single day. I don't need to hear any song every day.

But, rather than complain anecdotally, I decided to use the power of numbers. The Current makes a massive history of their playlist publicly available on their website, dating back to 2005. So I wrote a screen-scraper in Python to pull all the songs off the site and store them in a sqlite database, which I could then run queries on and make pretty spreadsheets and graphs.

On methods: I tried to normalize all the data before storage, such as stripping non-alphanumeric characters and converting to lowercase letters. This helps increase correct matches. I also ran queries against songs grouped by (artist, title) to avoid false matches on title alone. I don't think I screwed anything up, but I have no formal training in statistics, so no promises. All code used to collect and analyze the data, as well as the spreadsheets and graphs of the results, are available for download under the GPL here.

The question I wanted to answer was "is The Current's playlist shrinking, and how badly?" Generally speaking, a "good" playlist should play many different songs, and not play any particular songs too frequently. The challenge is to coax a subjective measurement like "good"-ness out of a massive pile of song listings.

The first measure I have is the "unique song ratio" - that is the number of distinct songs played in a period of time compared to the total number of songs played in that time. So it should be a fairly good measure of how much variety a playlist is offering. Higher is better - it means of the total playcount, there is a larger selection of songs played.

The numbers themselves are somewhat arbitrary, but there's a pretty clear and shocking trend visible here. Somewhere near the end of '07, things take a massive dive. The ratio over a week, which was hovering around 0.9, drops to nearly 0.6. It makes sense that the ratio over a month is lower all along - over the course of a month, it becomes much more likely that the song you're playing has already been aired. But when the giant dip in the graph levels out, the ratio over a week has leveled out right around where the ratio over a month used to be. That can't be good.

Similarly, we have average song plays, or the number of times a typical song will be played over a period of time.

That same programming shift is visible here, peaking at an average of 2.5 plays per song per month and leveling out over 2.

Of course, if The Current played every song exactly twice a month, I wouldn't have much room to complain (I might wonder if the director of programming had some nuerotic tendencies, but that's a separate issue). My concerns lie more in if certain songs are being overplayed. To further address that, let's measure the maximum playcount - the highest number of times any one song is played in a period of time.

Again, the same trend is plainly visible. And this time, the numbers themselves are troubling. The recent end of the graph is somewhere between 60 and 70. That's enough to play the most popular song for a given month more than twice a day, every single day. The weekly count is up near 20, which is almost three times a day for that week.

So... ouch. This isn't just a minor tweak to programming. To me, this looks like a shift in the very identity of the station. And I don't think I like the new Current as much as the old one.

I don't want to get too hyperbolic. I'm sure these numbers would still look very good put up against a Clear Channel subsidiary, or really just about any commercial station. I would have loved to compile some numbers from one of those stations to have a good laugh, but sadly I couldn't find any that made old playlists available. If you know of one, I'd be interested to hear.

All the complaints flying around are not because we haven't counted our blessings - it's because we know just how lucky we are, and we're afraid we're slowly losing our treasured station to the mainstream. So no, it's not the end of the world, and I'm not convinced 89.3 has sold out to The Man just yet. But I used to describe The Current to my friends as "single-handedly saving radio." And I'm starting to wonder if I can still count on them for that. Maybe it's time to lay the responsibility in Triple J's hands.

Postscript

I want to close with one more analysis. Curious if drive time or other factors would affect the playlist at all, I ran a set of queries for the same uniqueness ratio as above, but now broken up into two hour time slots throughout the week (and yes, I included the weekend, whether that's good or bad).

The orange line along the bottom is the monthly value, included just for reference. As you can see, most of the time slots follow the general trend towards less variety very closely. There are three slots, however, that don't: those from 4AM through 10AM. The Morning Show runs from 5-9AM. Strangely, the 6-8AM slot actually takes an upturn as everything else heads down. Did they ramp up their eclectic selection in reaction to the station's overall homogenization? I don't know. At any rate, woo yay Morning Show! Too bad it's ending forever in a week.

The Laundry Day Boxer Problem

As a certified lazy person, I've been known to put off chores like, say, laundry for quite some time. And since I can keep wearing the same pair of pants until I drop food on them or something, it's easy to let things slide a little too long. To moderate my laziness in this regard, I use a tried and true lazy person technique: laundry day boxers.

This is the pair of boxers that stays in the drawer until all the other boxers are gone. This is the pair that is so garish that even in your sleep-addled 8am state, you can't help but notice what you're putting on, and realize that this means the grace period is up. You can't put it off any longer. Your laundry day boxers are a constant reminder that you need to do laundry now.

I know some of you own laundry day boxers. Don't be shy. Mine are bright orange, with little bats and Frankenstein monsters on them. My old roommate had a pair that were silk, with a screenprint of Elvis on them - brilliant.

Now here's where I encounter a problem (see, that title was relevant after all!): I need something to wear on laundry day. That, naturally, is my laundry day boxers. But I can't wash them because I'm wearing them. So come next laundry day, what will alert me that it is, in fact, laundry day? My laundry day boxers are now dirty and in the laundry, where they are useless to me. Useless!

Having ruminated long and hard on this problem, the only solution I can come up with is to obtain a second pair of laundry day boxers. At that point it's just a bootstrapping problem to arrange things so that one pair remains clean the first time I do laundry post-acquisition. Then, come that first laundry day, the dirty pair gets cleaned while I wear the clean pair, and I alternate from then on.

It doesn't seem quite right though. I really feel like each person should only own one pair of laundry day boxers. Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to laundry day boxers, I believe in monogamy. I mean, when you're cavorting around in your purple sequined laundry day boxers, how do you think the ones with the Taco Bell chihuahua feel, down at the bottom of the hamper? Maybe I'm just off on this particular topic. Anyone out there own more than one pair of laundry day boxers? Maybe if I got two identical pairs, that might be a reasonable compromise - it's like I'm wearing the same pair, even if they're actually twins. And with that, I've strayed into borderline creepy analogy territory. Moving on.

Is this two-boxer solution the only way? Am I overlooking something painfully obvious? I feel like one of you people who likes game theory or something should be able to model this mathematically. This is serious business, folks.