Just

What if radio stations were people, too?

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Morten Just

You know how some radio stations only plays songs by a certain band? It's almost like a conspiracy, right?

I wanted to prove my point (and I was wrong), so I signed up Denmark's national radio station to last.fm.

The inverted radio station

Seeing the data flow in, I started dreaming about making two derivative radio stations from one radio station:

  1. DR P3 music would play only the music from the station. None of the chit chat from the hosts.
  2. DR P3 talk would - in real time - play the host chit chat, and then when music would come on, it would substitute it with your own.

Then I forgot about it.

Turns out it ran for almost a decade. Silently noting every single track played on the radio, adding it to last.fm.

For the primary music channel, that amounted to 619,606 plays.

The data's still there: DR P3, P6 Beat, Klassisk. The robots have a group.

Here's the chart for P3 from 2008 to 2018


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Stories

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Cover Image for An alarm clock that shows you that other people are awake
Experiments

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