Ok,this might be unanswerable but here goes. I want to know the odds of hearing a certain song on the radio. Here are the circumstances.
The song is from 1983, Faithfully by Journey. There are 6 radio stations preset in my car, all of which could play this song. I work from home and I don’t drive often or far, and hardly ever at the same time of day. Most of the time I will try all 6 stations and not hear anything I like so I turn on a cd. I hear this song quite often actually. This song has very significant meaning to me. Is this just coincidence? Or something more?
Surely it’s coincidence, otherwise there would have to be radio stations that are programming their music to your particular tastes, which is highly unlikely. Life is full of coincidences that we often try to attach some kind of meaning to.
We notice the things that mean something to us; it’s called Confirmation Bias. For example, when you just bought a new Mustang, you’re going to notice that all of a sudden, there are Mustangs everywhere! If you just had a baby, babies everywhere!
There is an actual metric that tracks the estimated number of radio plays any given song has in a year. I can’t seem to figure out how to find it.
Making the assumption that you are only listening to radio stations that will play the song, and that they all play the song equally (not terrible assumptions but perhaps not perfect either), it would be quite easy to figure out how likely you are at a given moment to catch Faithfully on the radio.
Unfortunately I’m not even sure what the ball park figure would be for how many times Faithfully gets played on US radio stations each year but it has to be in the 10’s of thousands.
But let’s just say for the sake of argument here that Faithfully is played 60,000 times per year on US Radio. We also need to know how many “Classic Rock” stations there are that would be playing this song. Again I’m going to have to make a wild ass guess but let’s say there are 1000 such stations in the US. This works out to each classic rock station playing Faithfully 60 times per year. Faithfully is a 4 minute 27 second long song. This means that any given radio station (on average, given our assumptions) is playing Faithfully for 4.45 hours a year.
You say you have 6 stations that you have preset that have a chance of playing the song, so that’s 26.7 song-hours of Faithfully per year. 8765.81 hours in a year gives you approximately a 0.3% chance of hearing Faithfully at any given moment when cycling through your 6 stations rapidly. Or that would be approximately 3 out of every 1000 times you cycle through your stations, you catch Faithfully. Probably not all that inaccurate, eh?