Where to find historical radio station playlists?

September 21, 2006 8:57 PM

Where to find historical radio station playlists?

As a kid I listened to 103.9 WDRE, a modern rock format station in Philadelphia, and recently it occurred to me that if I could track down a large percentage of the songs they played and stick them in a playlist for iTunes to shuffle, it would be a little like having the (dear departed) station on my desktop. The valuable data is not the songs I remember hearing, but rather what I don't remember but would if I heard again. So: is there a source for old radio station playlists? I've Googled around, but to no avail.

posted by symbebekos to media & arts (5 comments total)

how old are you?
posted by carsonb at 9:14 PM on September 21, 2006

OK.
There are a couple of ways that you can track these things down, but the ways that I know take legwork and I'm not sure they're universal.
First off, find out if they're a reporting station to any charts. If so, you can call up the folks that they report to and they'll usually have the data. If it's Billboard, I believe they want you to pay for it. CMJ will give it to you for free (or at least gave me the logs for free).
There should also be FCC station logs of every song and PSA, though how long they're kept depends on the station.
I guess if I were doing this, the first thing I'd do is call up and ask to speak to the program manager and ask him about the reporting and how long the logs are kept. As it's a "dear departed" station (which I didn't catch the first time I read the question), you might want to look for former station managers and program managers from the time that you enjoyed listening. You can also look to local museums and archives. I know that the Detroit Historical Museum has records of several stations charts around here from different time periods. Since it's likely that you were a kid during the heyday of regional radio, it's likely that some of that has been preserved as regional charts in a nearby museum.
posted by klangklangston at 10:32 PM on September 21, 2006

I'm asking your age to get an idea of when you were a kid, or when you were listening to 103.9 WDRE. if that was 10 years ago, there's a slight chance you can find the info on the internet--- though FCC doesn't seem to keep any sort of publicly available airplay reports archive. if that was 20 years ago, there's a slight chance you can research the evolution of that station and contact its current incarnation to see if they keep those kinds of records (NPI), though if they did they probably don't keep them this long.

airplay archives are a pain in the ass to manage, I can't imagine radio station personnel wanting to keep them around longer than is strictly necessary. sounds like what you're looking for is a DJ who kept all their airplay lists. sorry, but that's only slightly more likely than you actually being able to track one down that did.

I have a suggestion based on your "modern rock" classification, a term that boils down for me to "pop + decade". check out the billboard charts archives, and maybe use them in conjunction with a music map like gnod or liveplasma. or just put the bands you remember into those things and click around a bit. not a great suggestion, again I'm sorry, but it's something.
posted by carsonb at 10:49 PM on September 21, 2006 [1 favorite]

I've been an engineer at a number of AM and FM stations, and the typical air "log" for stations more than 10 years ago, before the advent of full automation, was just a slow speed tape recorder, capable of recording several days worth of broadcast air, at low fidelity. Most stations recycled tapes weekly. There often wasn't any written record of air play, the FCC has never required such written logs be submitted to them, and the FCC certianly don't keep them (but most stations logged to tape to have evidence of their own in case of obscenity disputes, etc.). ASCAP and BMI (the major U.S. music licensing bodies) used to employ people to sit around listening to radio station air tapes in selected major markets, to develop their own frequency of play statistics, from which they divided the broadcast stations music license fees for payment to artists. I knew guys in Nashville that went over to ASCAP or BMI offices, sat around listening to two different stations in seperate earphones, while keeping play stat sheets, and at the same time, were writing country songs (might account for the low standard of country music in the 1970's). The ASCAP and BMI verification money was pretty small, but a lot of struggling music guys did it, because it was pretty easy money, and you could do it all hours of the day and night.

These days, most stations are full digital automation, and anything that is tagged in their audio library server can be diddled into a report. ASCAP and BMI get automated log reports for 2 or 3 broadcast days in each fiscal quarter, from almost 100% of U.S. Stations , and they might have old station records on file from years back. But even with the advent of digital station automation, data collection, and storage, I still doubt that in 10 years, anybody is going to want to have hard drive space devoted to airplay lists, as there just aren't that many requests for them, that are willing to pay for them. But you might contact ASCAP or BMI, to see what, if anything, they might still have available.
posted by paulsc at 12:00 AM on September 22, 2006

Yes, type in the station call letters or if you forgot them type in your zip code and search for them. For most large stations and many others it will tell you what songs were recently played, played today or yesterday.
posted by caddis at 6:55 AM on September 22, 2006