Is there a name for the situation where you switch from one radio station to another and it’s playing the same song?
It’s downright eerie when it happens. This deserves something better than just ‘coincidence’.
BTW
once I did this and the two stations were exactly in synch
once I did a ‘triple’
Not only is not not a coincidence, it’s almost the definition of coincidnce. (Hmmm, even if you break the word down co-incidence, it still works). Yup, I’m gonna go with coincidence.
ETA The MW definition applies even better. Your situation could almost be used as an example.
That’s a real knot of nots there.
I once ran into an extreme case of this kind of coincidence. Not only were two radio stations playing the same song, but they’d started within about a tenth of a second of each other! It took me several hits of the buttons on the radio to convince myself that I hadn’t hit the wrong button when changing stations.
Are you sure the stations aren’t networked? (i.e. was this a one-off?) - I know there are broadcasting techniques now in use where the DJ and music are used on several stations, but the jingles, ads, news, travel and weather were customised to the local area - it’s all in the timing…
I find this alot on call-in request shows. I always assumed that one station would play it, someone would miss the beginning, and then they would call the other station to request it to be played.
I remember posting in a similar thread a few years ago–I had this happen to me in college around 1964. But the most fascinating thing to me was that one station was ahead of the other by about a second. By the time the song ended, the station that was ahead was 2-4 seconds behind the first one. The station that was playing the song the faster always billed themselves as “more music per hour than any other local station.” Then I knew how they did it.
Definitely a one-time occurance. Otherwise the stations’ programming was completely different.
This is no joke - radio stations can and do actually tweak the playback speed of their songs to make them fit better into the schedule.
I had this happened to me a few times with two competing radio stations here in Milwaukee. They played similar formats so I’d often switch back and forth catch them playing the exact same song, almost in sync with each other.
I wondered if one of the stations did this to see how many people would call up to say, “Hey do you know that station X is playing the same song right now?” Just to get a glimpse of how many people switch around and care enough to call in and comment.
Was the song “Synchronicity” by the Police?
There were two rock stations around here that often played the same song at the same time (can’t get away from it on either channel!) I often wondered if they were managed by the same people or something.
What, you think the DJs are just throwing on whatever they feel like? Hell no! Those songs are researched to death just as any other consumer product. It isn’t surprising to hear the top songs of the week played during rush hour and other peak listening times. If you’ve got two stations to pick from and they both have 6 or 7 songs that they need to get on between the same hours, why is it hard to imagine they’d coincide?
As IntelSoldier kinda mentioned. If the two stations were Top 40 (read: Pop) stations, they take the top 10 songs that week and play each of those songs at least once every two hours. Hence hearing the same song over and over and over at work if they have one of those stations on. If you have two or more stations that are top 40, I could see it happening fairly often. Still a conincidence though.
Many U.S. (if not most, these days) radio stations are either owned by one of a handful of media companies, or they subscribe to programming services that give them song-by-song programs. This is why I find most popular broadcast radio programming in the U.S. to be unbearable. There are companies that test each song with focus groups then sell the program lists. There was an interesting story on the practice in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine about 2-3 years ago – it is probably available on-line. Because of this phenomenon, one will hear only a very limited variety of songs in most radio markets, or even across markets. For stations that play current hits, if they do not subscribe to a programming or format service, one may hear songs that are in “heavy rotation” almost every hour.
More than once, I’ve heard the same song played three times in the span of a little more than an hour. Usually in a scenario like this:
1st time: DJ #1 plays hit song in the next-to-last hour of his show. Meanwhile, he’s conducting a call-in survey of the most popular songs of the night.
2nd time: DJ #1 plays hit song again as part of his show-ending countdown, based on the aforementioned survey.
3rd time: DJ #2 comes on the air, completely unaware of what DJ #1 has just played (probably because his show is pre-recorded), plays the same song to start off his show.
No, it was “At The Same Time” by Barbra Streisand. Or “Simultaneous” by Pulp. Or anything at all by N*SYNC. 
I used to be loyal to one station, but those days are gone. Since then, I flip around a lot looking for the best song at the moment. Yes, I’ve known stations to be playing the same song. It’s rare, but it happens…
All this talk about repeated songs makes me appreciate my favorite radio station more. KBCO in Boulder, CO. Hippies make the best DJs!