Radio, Radio, Part 2.

As follow-up to this post back in August, I went back and compared playlists for the four music stations on my car stereo presets -- WXRT, WZZN, WKQX, WTMX -- and cross-checked them against WWCD in Columbus, OH.

The results pretty much confirm what I've been suspecting:

XRT has been moving toward its old style of playing a few songs heavily but mostly a lot of songs rarely; their old slogan was "Everything in no particular order," and while they're certainly not that anymore, at least they're a little bit closer to it.

The Mix (WTMX) plays the same songs to death -- the top seven songs on their playlist were aired more than 40 times, and while the other playlists showed 40 songs, theirs only listed 34. The bottom five songs on their list were played only once in the week reported.

Q101 (WKQX) and The Zone (WZZN) duplicated 16 of 40 songs, especially toward the top end of their lists -- seven of The Zone's top 10 were played on Q101, and six of Q101's top 10 were on The Zone. Only four songs were in both stations' top 10, however. The Zone's playlist was far more top-heavy than Q101's: they played Audioslave's "Show Me How to Live" and Godsmack's "Serenity" 57 times each, while Q101 played them only 40 and 39 times, respectively. The least played song in Q101's top 40 was played 10 times (311's "Creatures"), while The Zone's least played of the top 40 was played only 3 times (Staind's "Layne" {Staind was also at No. 18 with "So Far Away," played 21 times).

Interestingly, the two stations seem to be diverging, despite their large playlist overlaps. Q101 appears to be becoming more eclectic, while The Zone is switching to a hard rock format -- Anthrax shows up in their playlist, and I've heard AC/DC's "Back in Black" and "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" while passing through recently. Very odd, indeed.

Comparing the foursome to CD101 (WWCD), Q101 overlapped on 16 songs, XRT on 8, and The Zone and The Mix only had one song in common with the Columbus station. The overlapping songs were all over the place though, rather than bunched at the top; the most heavily overlapped section was the second quartile, with 9/10 songs duplicated.

What's this all mean? Well, again, Chicago radio sucks. But in some ways it's getting better. Q101 and XRT's changes bode well, and although I'm not interested in hard rock, no doubt there are plenty of people happy that The Zone is filling in the gap left by Rock 103.5's format switch of a couple years ago. Now if someone would just convince Q101 to have guest DJs more often, we'll be all set.

Posted by Andrew Huff at September 24, 2003 04:07 PM