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Deep Tracks — Radio Misfits 13 — Classic Rock Revival
Radio and streaming channels maintain a large audience. Many of the songs range between 25–50 years old. If a single song, let’s pick on “Stairway to Heaven” (no disparaging the song). The American radio trade magazines list the top 200 radio markets, for example, the largest is New York City, somewhere in the top 200 is Tucson, AZ and Panama City, FL. Every radio market has (on average) one or two classic rock format radio stations. For the sake of complicating this, let’s leave streaming services out of the conversation.
Simple math, let’s say, basing the math on one classic rock channel in each market, 200 total. A modest two spins of the Zeppelin classic every week, once during the morning commute and once at 10PM.
That’s 8 plays a month, times 200 is 1,600 spins a month! Multiply that by the release year of the song, 1971. 52 years ago, that’s a lot of plays, 998,400 times, a reasonable estimate. There are plenty of songs the listening audience doesn’t need to wait for all request Friday to hear a song rarely played over the airwaves.
This morning, bouncing from errand to errand, less than 15 minutes in the car in between each stop, I heard two songs that need to be banned due to excessive replay. “The Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy and “Crazy Train” by Ozzy. Both classics. Both way…
