Radio, radio

My car's CD player is still dead, so I've been forced to listen to the radio. Much of my time is spent listening to NPR, but as previously noted, I'm getting a little sick of the same news over and over. So I've been switching stations quite a bit.

For the last year or so, my six preset buttons are programmed thusly:
1 = WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio)
2 = WNUR (Northwestern's college station)
3 = WLUW (Loyola's independent station)
4 = WXRT (XRT, a "AAA" format station)
5 = WJMK (Magic 104, oldies format)
6 = WZZN (The Zone, alternative/hard rock format)

I haven't listened to WNUR very much during that time, because they play free jazz in the morning -- atonal trumpet bleats and lopsided drum rhythms make me crabby -- and "aggressively indie" rock (you know, the type of music some people play in order to alienate other people?) in the afternoons. I'd listen to WLUW a lot more if their signal was stronger, but at around Lake-Cook Rd. the Milwaukee public radio station interferes. And just when I start to get a solid signal in the evening, their news program begins. So I've mainly been bouncing between XRT and The Zone. Neither of which I'm all that fond of anymore, but Zone plays "Nineties at Nine" in the mornings, which is nice. Magic 104 pretty much just got the shaft.

Then Cinnamon sent me a link to radio station playlists yesterday, and I decided to do a little research. I printed up the sample playlists from XRT and The Zone as well as two competitors, The Mix (WTMX) and Q101 (WKQX), and marked any songs that were played on more than one station. The results were, sadly, not all that surprising.

Out of the top 40 most played songs, The Zone and Q101 overlapped on half the playlist. In each station's top ten, six songs were played on the other -- though not the same six songs. The overlap between The Mix and XRT was less severe, with only five songs appearing on both playlists. Only one song appeared on more than two lists: Q101, The Mix and The Zone all played "Bring Me To Life" by Evanescence.

What did all this tell me? Well, first of all, they all suck, especially Q101 and The Zone. Way to differentiate yourselves, boys. Actually, based on the songs that didn't overlap between the two, I liked what Q101 was playing better. The downside is Mancow. So I kept The Zone on a button and replaced WNUR with Q101 for the drive home. And The Mix actually had a decent, er, mix of stuff, including some stuff I really like, so it replaced Magic 104 on button number five.

Just out of curiousity, I checked out the playlist for CD101 (WWCD), the Columbus station we reviled when I was at OSU. They played 15 songs that overlapped with one or more of the four Chicago stations, with the most (11) being played on Q101. And the majority of the songs that didn't overlap are from independent labels or smaller imprints of the majors, bands like Flaming Lips, Goldfrappe, The Roots and Fountains of Wayne. The most played song on CD101 is "Bandages" by Hot Hot Heat, which comes in at #15 on Q101's playlist and doesn't register on the other three.

Almost makes me wish I still lived in Columbus. Almost.

(Incidentally, all five of these stations are owned by different companies: XRT is owned by Infinity Broadcasting, The Mix is owned by Bonneville, Q101 is an Emmis Communications station, The Zone is owned by ABC Radio, and CD101 is owned by Ingleside Radio.)

Posted by Andrew Huff at August 7, 2003 02:56 PM