Top 40 Radio and the Punditsphere
Someone is always just tuning in
I was driving The Pip somewhere recently, and we were flipping around the radio presets trying to find a station that wasn’t playing ads for ambulance-chasing lawyers. We landed on a Top 40 station (helpfully identified as such by the digital radio display), which was playing the exact same song we had heard the last time we were on that station, earlier the same day.
“Top 40?!” said The Pip. “More like Top 5! Do they even play ten songs?”
I laughed, because that’s a pretty good analysis for an 11-year-old, but it reminded me of a cousin I had who was a DJ at the pop station back in my high school days (shout-out to WAAL 99.1 FM…). I remember the same argument coming up one time when he was around, and his explanation has stuck with me (and I relayed it to The Pip).
“Whatever the hot song of the moment is, we could play it at the top and bottom of the hour, every hour, and I’d still get ten calls at 2:45 asking me to play it again. No matter how often we play it, someone always tunes in just after the last play, and wants to hear that song right now.”
I was thinking about this last night because we’ve had another round of one of my least favorite forms of social-media #discourse, namely “I can’t believe the New York Times is running yet another op-ed I don’t agree with!” This comes around at least once a month, and it always grates. Sometimes, for variety, it’s the Washington Post instead, or a specific blogger or freelance columnist, but it’s always the same thing: How dare they keep banging on about this subject when we’ve heard their Take before?
And, look, this is not to say that the mass media don’t repeat themselves. They absolutely do tend to run very similar columns over and over. There’s also a vicious-cycle element to this, where complaints about yet another piece about whatever spawn pieces complaining about the complaints, which spawn complaints about the complaints about the complaints, and on and on in a wildly diverging splenetic series. And yes, I’m aware that this post could be construed as the (j+1)th entry in such a series.
But the reason for this is exactly the same as the reason for the low entropy of Top 40 radio playlists: somebody is always just tuning in. If you’re a highly engaged political obsessive of the type that dominates Twitter, you’re basically like the guy who’s in the car running errands listening to the pop station all day long, who’s heard that song four times already. But that’s not most people. Most people aren’t following the op-ed pages all that closely, in the same way that most people aren’t sitting next to the radio all day long. They’re dipping in occasionally, when they have time or somebody forwards them a link, just like people whose only radio listening is on the drive home at the end of the day.
I’ve said this before in the context of pop-science writing: there are people who write about physics and astronomy who regularly recapitulate the exact same argument about how the Many-Worlds Interpretation is Bad, or about the failings of dark matter and the superiority of MOND, or about the unreasonably high cost of particle accelerators, or about the failings of MOND and the superiority of dark matter, and so on. Those topics come around again and again and again, always with the same people on the same sides, and I just roll my eyes.
But those topics are absolutely evergreen, because as my cousin said years ago, somebody is always just tuning in, having narrowly missed the last round of the argument, and they’re happy to hear it. I’m not interested in reading it again (or writing it), but that’s because I’m a weirdo who reads way too much of this shit in the first place.
This used to bother me more, but since coming around to the realization that I’m not the audience for this, I’m much more chill. They’re playing the hits for the people who are just tuning in, and I can close the tab or change the station, and go on about the rest of my day.
If you’re not sick of hearing me say this kind of thing, here’s a button to get more of it:
If you’re somehow annoyed by my lukewarm squishiness and want to take this to the next higher order, the comments will be open:
Reminds me of a story I love telling. My very first real job - a summer gig between my junior and senior years of high school - I was working in the records department of a pharmaceutical company (shout out to Burroughs-Wellcome, long since absorbed by some other corporate behemoth).
My job was to sit in a dark room methodically microfilming documents. I'd empty a box of records, and go through it page by page, putting each one under a camera, pressing a button to photograph it, move it to the "done" stack and moving on to the next one. All day long, ten hours a day, all summer long. After about the third day of this, I swiped my sister's transistor radio so that I'd have something to listen to while I tried to avoid dying of boredom.
The only radio station I could get was the local Top-40 station, and they constantly advertised that they'd play "ten hits every hour!" After a couple of days I realized what they really meant was the *same* ten hits every hour. It was the summer that the Dirty Dancing soundtrack was all the rage, and to this day I can sing the songs that made the radio by heart, some 30+ years later.
The question, of course, is whether you can find anything for which you *are* the audience. I find it frustrating that in many cases, either what I want doesn't exist, or it's incredibly hard to find. (Cue rant about news sites and searches that think everyone cares primarily about whatever is "trending".)
Oddly enough, I can do a bit better with the punditsphere than I can with more mundane things. Someone on substack probably produces something more suitable to me (or you?) than the NYT does. But no one wants to sell me appliances that don't have "soft" controls, and far too often at least the potential for software "upgrades" not under my control, potentially changing their user interface.