Keeping up with the Top 40

After finishing grad school last year I did what a lot of folks do and attempted to catch up on the various books, films, games, music, and television shows I had been putting on hold while working on my Masters.

Being a relatively organized guy, I decided the simplest thing to do was to track the popular stuff from the last few years (using everything from Nielsen Ratings to Publishers weekly and IMDB to track down what sold the most and then figure out how far behind I was.

For Film and TV I actually didn't do too bad - I ended up with less than a dozen series and about 40 films behind my kids and friends, so I could catch up pretty quickly.

With books I was a bit further behind, but as my BFF Mike tends to read the current big SF I wasn't doing too badly either.

This left me with music.

In terms of popular music I was actually about twenty years behind anything that was really popular.  This doesn't mean I wasn't listening to anything good, just not anything really current.

So I decided each week I would start listening to the top ten songs in Canada.  Then, bowing to the inevitable, I added the US top ten list (an awful lot of overlap) and after a few months decided to add the UK top ten list as well (which actually introduced me to a number of Canadian artists) and about a month ago I added the Australian top ten list as well.

So far the experiment has been pretty fun - I recognize way more songs on the radio and in the malls, and every once I a while I surprise my musically-inclined friends with some trendy info.

So there you go - I'm creating a baseline understanding of current Top 40 music in the western world - not sure what I'll do with this info, but I have to admit it's a lot of fun!

Me and my tunes

After finishing grad school I was quickly able to increase my reading-for-pleasure habit from seven books a month back up to ten. This was excellent, as it gave me another Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction book a month to comment on.

But after a couple weeks, I realized that if my reading habits had slid back a little during school, my music tastes had virtually withered away. I’d spent the last few years listening to my aging iPod playlist, which, to be fair got updated time to time by my wife, who listens to a lot more contemporary music than I do, but for the large part, my musical tastes tend to live comfortably in the years between 1999 and 2004 (ages 23 – 27, respectively).

So, I decided to do something about it, and as a library-trained list making guy, I decided to use some basic filters.

New music comes out at an incredible rate – even if I limited myself to just listening to my local top-40 radio station or watching the music videos linked from the ads at the beginning of YouTube videos I watch, I would be checking out dozens of new songs a week.

So I turned to the Billboard charts – which have been keeping track of the top 100 songs currently in play since 1958, and selected the American list (where the lists originated), the Canadian list (where I live), and the UK list (as my musical tastes tend to lean that way if left alone), and began listening to the top ten on all three lists every Monday.

What I noticed right away is that there is a lot of overlap. With the exception of the UK list, which varies somewhere between 2 and 8 songs from the American list on any given week, the Canadian list tends to be roughly 60% identical to the American, if not in ranking, at least in which songs are on the list.

I’m not sure if listening to all these tunes (which usually means listening to about 18 songs a week, as I don’t listen to the same song if it appears on another list), is making me smarter, more culturally aware, or relatable to my kids, but it does tend to mean I’m a little bit faster in recognizing songs playing on the radio.

And as I'm adding new tunes to my iPod playlist can’t be considered completely golden oldies anymore.