Thought Experiment: No-Repeat Radio Station

Factual Questions
1

Let’s say, for a second, that I decide to be a DJ on a radio station. I look around, and notice all the claims of “No-Repeat Workday” or “No-Repeat 9-5”. And yet every day, they play the same stuff. Well, I can do better, I say.

In my radio program, there will be no repeats. Ever. If I play a song, be it Mozart’s Symphony No. 5, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music of the Night, Van Halen’s Jump, Outkast’s Hey Ya, or David Wise’s Snakey Chantey, it will never be repeated again on my show. However, as seen above, I am not particularly picky. This radio station will not be limited to any genre or era. If it is music, it can be played on this station!

Now, of course, no radio station is composed of one man’s program. There’s a morning Zoo show, an evening Coast to Cost contracted out to some far-off station, and the ever-present commercials. Let’s figure that my program runs from 8 AM to 8 PM. I have no hard numbers for commercials, but my guess is about 3 minutes of commercials for 10 minutes of songs. Let’s say 1/3 of the program is non-music, allowing time for me to announce the songs coming up. That’s 8 hours of music a day.

So the question is: Can this program run indefinitely? If not, when will it end?

2

Well, if you run out of existing recorded music, you can simply install a piano and improvise endlessly.

3

Forgetting about the backlog of extant music in the world, the question you’re really asking is ‘do at least 8 hours of new music get produced daily?’ The answer is of course yes by any estimate. So go for it!

Gets even easier if you allow cover versions.

4

You can only run indefinitely if 56 hours (or 40 if you skip weekends) or more of new music is released every week forever. Otherwise, you’re going to be eating into the back catalog a little bit every week. Yes, it may take MANY years to use up that entire catalog (longer than you’ll be alive), but it will happen some day.

So, the question is, how much new music is released every week? I assume you’re willing to play different versions of the same song, but not the exact same version just because it was re-released. So you need to skip most “best of” albums, but not much else. I’m not sure how much music is released globally every week. New Music Tipsheet lists these releases for this week: “KT TUNSTALL, TOBY KEITH, BRUNO MARS, DAVID ARCHULETA, FISTFUL OF MERCY, CLINIC, CORIN TUCKER, DONAVON FRANKREITER, AVETT BROTHERS, ALAIN JOHANNES, EMILY OSMENT, FINGER ELEVEN, FRAN HEALY, GUSTER, JARS OF CLAY, JOE SATRIANI, RAUL MALO, TRICKY, and WAKA FLOCKA FLAME.” Now, NMT only covers the US and doesn’t mention literally every album released. But I think that gives us an idea of the order of magnitude of music released in the US in a week. If I counted correctly, that’s 19 albums. If they’re about an hour each, that covers roughly one third of your week. Do you think there’s another 37 albums released elsewhere each week? My guess would be no, but I could be wrong.

FWIW, the number of albums release varies quite a bit week to week.

Again, based purely on NMT, last week had 36 (I think – hard to count with ALL CAPS): KENNY CHESNEY, ERIC CLAPTON, SEAL, LIL BOOSIE, GUCCI MANE, JEREMIH, BAD RELIGION, JIMMY EAT WORLD, MUSHROOMHEAD, NO AGE, RONNIE WOOD, PETE YORN, BEN FOLDS & NICK HORNBY, MARK RONSON, NELLIE MCKAY, PHIL COLLINS, THE DOOBIE BROTHERS, GIN BLOSSOMS, OMD, THE POSIES, DEERHUNTER, THREE MILE PILOT, ABE VIGODA, ADAM HAWORTH STEPHENS, THE 88, SOUNDGARDEN, DIRTY PROJECTORS, YAZ, ALICE COOPER, TOM TOM CLUB, WIDESPREAD PANIC, MUTEMATH, KENNY WAYNE SHEPHERD, LOS LONELY BOYS, SLIPKNOT, and RUSH.

But the week of July 19th had 13: SHERYL CROW, JONAS BROTHERS, RICK ROSS, BIG HEAD TODD, FRAZEY FORD, 12 STONES, JIMMY GNECCO, RY CUMING, STEREO SKYLINE, THE BOOKS, ZERO 7, STEP UP, and JERSEY SHORE

5

Hmm. I guess I looked at it from a different angle, considering only commercial releases of recorded music. Clearly far more than 8 hours of music get produced a day, but if they’re not released, how could you play them on the radio? I’m not positive that 8 hours of recorded music aren’t produced per day, but I’m not convinced they are either.

6

in the realm of electronica alone you could easily come up with 8 hours of new tunes per day, hell I would bet you could make it a part of the show if you played music that was created that very day.

I would f-ing love this station btw, I love tossing my entire mp3 collection in a player and hitting shuffle, it will run for close to 2 weeks without a repeat.

7

If you include non-big-label-publisher indie music, you definitely have an unlimited supply. I have access to a database of indie music and it contains 2820 solid days’ worth of music released in the past 8 months. That means every minute, 10.3 minutes of music was released.

8

I should have used the word “published” not “produced”. But the answer’s still “duh, of course!”

9

I don’t think this is a safe assumption. The OP did say “If I play a song, be it Mozart’s Symphony No. 5 … it will never be repeated again on my show.” This suggests to me that he’s only going to play one recording of Mozart’s 5th (or, better yet, Beethoven’s 5th, which probably has hundreds of different recordings). If not, that would make things a lot easier on him. After all, your list didn’t even mention classical (or jazz, or various other genres). I really do think your list vastly underestimates the amount of new music being recorded.

10

I think a station might be able to do this just playing records produced in the United States alone. c.50 albums per week = 7 albums per day. Let’s say that’s 6 to 7 hours of new music per day from mainstream labels alone. Add to that countless hours of music produced by niche labels and huge numbers of unsigned artists, it would be easy.

I work in a radio station in the UK and I’d say we get about two hundred different records sent to us every week. And we are an alternative station so we generally don’t get anything mainstream sent to us, not anything classical, or from the niche genres like dance music and folk etc (although we do get a air few of those). Add to those unsigned artists producing music unprofessionally, archived radio session tracks, concert recordings, and live on air performance.

Now consider industries across Europe, Africa, the middle East, the far east etc etc etc and you could probably have several radio stations doing it.

Good luck in ingesting all that onto your server.
A better question might be, how many new records are released every year or even how many original songs are composed every day - though I suspect that last question is unanswerable…

11

I’m going to have to say, yes. Running on the 56 album a week estimate, that really isn’t difficult to meet at all once you start including non-mainstream music. I used to receive a newsletter from an underground metal label that included all the releases from their and similar labels, and it would usually include around 12-15 albums a week. I’d expect that other genres with large undergrounds, like electronic and rap, you could easily see similar productivity and, along with the mainstream stuff, that gets you pretty close to that goal. Once you through in the really tiny labels and self releases, and not to forget non-western music, it’s hard to imagine it doesn’t push over that number consistently, and usualy by a large margin. At that point, you’d still have an extensive back library to use as a buffer for the rare weeks when you get less. How would you feel about live versions, cover versions, and remixes of songs? That could add quite a lot too.

In fact, considering that the amount of music being recorded around the world, and that it’s only likely to increase as time goes on, I expect that with the current library, you’d probably be able to start playing 24/7 now, and before the time you run out of stuff to play, if we haven’t quite reached the point of ~168 albums a week yet, we will before you run out of stuff.

12

Parenthetically…the classic rock station here in Chicago just concluded an event which they run every year or so, in which they played every song in their library, in alphabetical order. It took them just over 8 days.

13

Assume that the OP plays through all the music and no new music is being published. He starts back at the beginning of the list and runs the song through a backwards transmogrifier and plays it. He continues on through the list all the way to the end.

I think one could argue that when a song is played backwards, it is, generally, a different song (except for “Horse With No Name”, which sounds like it only has 1 chord … the words might be a little jumbled, though :slight_smile: )

If the OP gets through the end of the list a second time, he could then run each song through a randomizer, which would chop each song into 1-second snippets and rearrange them.

I grant that much of what is played on the station the second and subsequent times might not be to everyone’s taste.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the OP would never run out of “music”.

14

About once a week, I surf round the indie record labels that I like, and the sites that aggregate and rate unsigned indie artists, and you could easily pick up 30-40 records a week just doing that. Just the sample songs they publish for downloading would probably keep your station running, without even playing whole albums.

You can do the same for country, americana, ‘roots’, and folk - labels and unsigned but well rated artists. I don’t, but I’ve run across them in my searches, and they produce even more, if anything.

I once ran across a site that was nothing but bands doing 80s Depeche-mode style music - just that and nothing more - it had over 100 bands still doing recordings (on tiny labels or self-publishing). It looked to be posting about 5 ish albums a week worth.

There’s a LOT of music out there.

15

Hm - not counting audiobooks, 6427 items, 39.7 gB, 23.2 days of music. I have another 17 days of audiobooks.

16

Wikipedia says the iTunes store has 11 million + songs for sale. Admittedly, some are duplicates, alternate releases and re-recordings, but we all know that iTunes doesn’t have everything either.

So… just based on that number, and estimating 4 minutes per song: 83.7 years of music played 24/7/365. If you limit that to 8 hours of music per day, then 250 years. Since your great-great-great-grandkids won’t even know what radio is, I think you’re covered. :slight_smile:

17

Somehow, this thread just blew my mind a little. To think that there’s more music produced than one could even in principle listen to… Damn, and to think about all the artists I’m already shelving to return to eventually…

Just yesterday, I read a paper that argued that in the fairly near future, thanks to automation, scientific discoveries will outpace human ability to keep up, astronomy being potentially the first discipline to hit this barrier – this being presented as a post-singularity scenario.

Well, turns out that in regards to pop music, we’re already post-singularity in a sense, and have been for presumably quite some time! And if you think about it, the same is likely the case in literature, as well; movies and television, probably, too.

:eek:

18

It would be possible, but not feasible, since you’d have to play stuff from every genre. I don’t think too many people would listen to a radio station that played rock, pop, country, punk, alternative, metal, disco, gospel, blues, jazz, etc, etc.
But if you did that, you could go on infinitely without repeating yourself.

19

Just be sure to have an up-to-the-second playlist available in as many ways as possible. If I hear an utterly amazing song on your station, I’ll note the time and go to check your playlist. And it had better be there, because I’ll never hear it again.

Edit: re music production: isn’t there a lot of music that is produced at least semi-algorithmically? Loops and sampling and such? You could potentially have a non-repeating channel that was being produced as it was being listened to, in realtime. :slight_smile:

20

Hasn’t this been true about books for centuries?