Apparently, the majority of music radio listeners these days prefer stations which focus more on “classic” tracks from the past rather than current chart hits. I have to admit that I fall into that category as well; the majority of my radio listening is to Absolute Radio or Greatest Hits Radio (and occasionally Kiss and Planet Rock) rather than stations playing contemporary hits.

One thing that’s always irritated me slightly, though, about “gold” format radio is that it tends to play tracks out of context. In reality, popular music follows a discernible pattern through the year; there’s a noticable difference between the types of songs that are popular in summer and those that are popular in winter. Not necessarily every song, of course, but enough for it to make a difference. Apart from mid to late December, though, when the “gold” stations go all-out, and often excessively, festive on their playlists, you don’t get a sense of that when listening to them.

So, I thought I’d see if I could come up with something which fills that gap. I’ve created an algorithmically generated Spotify playlist which includes a selection of songs which would have been on contemporary music radio playlists at this time of year.

Basically, how it works is that it looks for songs which were either in the charts or were, at the time, recent new releases on this day in past years – that is, the sort of songs that would have been  on contemporary music playlists at the time. It then assigns each song a weighting based on a number of factors.

For example, songs get uprated for being new releases, new entries, big risers or number ones, and downrated for being fallers or for having lingered a long time in the chart. It also adds a small amount of random jitter so successive days aren’t identical, even though they’ll be based on very similar dates.

It then picks the hundred with the highest daily rating, and updates the playlist accordingly.

A hundred songs is approximately six hours listening, so if you feel like it you can listen to this most of the day and you should only hear each song once.

I’ve called it “Seasons” because the idea is that it will change with the seasons as you listen to it over the course of a year.

This is very experimental, and I’ve love feedback on how well you think this works. One of the obvious downsides is that it does result in a wildly varying mix of genres and eras. You could find yourself going from Metallica to Taylor Swift to Elvis Presley in the space of a few songs.  Plus, of course, at Christmas you will get St Winifred’s School Choir alongside Slade and Joe Dolce alongside Ultravox. And numerous tediously unmemorable X-Factor winners.

But then, that’s a bit like the radio would have been at the time, so there is at least a hint of authenticity there. I am excluding a small number of artists with convictions for certain criminal offences – you can probably guess which ones I mean – but other than that, I’m not applying any editorial control.

Anyway, here’s the playlist as an embed in this page. If you prefer to go directly to it on the Spotify website, or open it in the app, the link is underneath. And please, let me know what you think in the comments.

 

Direct link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7eeRB8ZvkaLrRdQpFYOS43?si=PpKfu2P6RP2eTnPLl6WWrw