Retro Radio Limitations

As someone who's introduction to music was basically 80s pop a bit of 80s music is always welcome. Many would no doubt agree given the amount of 80s nostalgia there is whether it's radio stations or 80s themed bars.

For me though it's not so much hearing "Karma Chameleon" for the 10 millionth time that I liked, it's more hearing an 80s song that I haven't heard since the 80s or even hearing an 80s song I've never heard before.

When music channels like Magic came along it was great. I was hearing a number of songs for the first time since the 80s. However it wouldn't be long until I'd hear said songs more than I'd heard them in the 80s.

Then there came a point in my life where I wanted to explore more 80s music and also found myself in a job where we could listen to music on our headphones. That's when I discovered Absolute 80s and started listening to that at work. In the beginning it was great, I was discovering some songs I'd never heard before. They also had a no repeat guarantee so I'd never hear the same song twice on a given day.

However, whilst I wouldn't hear said song for the rest of the day, I was more or less guaranteed to hear it again the next day. It soon became apparent they were basically playing the same bunch of songs in a different order every day. I soon got sick of it.

These days I'm in an office where the radio is on and it tends to be one of the retro stations. The first day I heard Smooth Radio I was surprised to hear them playing "The Longest Time" by Billy Joel which isn't one of his bigger hits. But that one seems to get played on a daily basis on that station. Each station may have the odd one or two songs that are a bit out of the ordinary but essentially they play the same thing every day.

Taking the 80s as an example, the problem is that it's a 10 year period of time that happened over 30 years ago. All 80s music has now been made.

There were a total of 3324 Top 40 hits in the 80s. If we say on average a song is between 3 to 3 and a half minutes long that means around 18 songs can be played an hour. Therefore if you played every 80s Top 40 hit back to back it would take 179 hours which is just under 7.5 days. Or if we look at it another way, if we work 40 hour weeks it would take us 4.5 weeks to listen to every Top 40 hit of the 80s at work.

Obviously there was much more to 80s music than what was in the Top 40. But for an 80s station to work there needs to be a degree of familiarity. There are some acid house records that were big in the rave scene but got nowhere near the charts, but only ravers are going to appreciate it and would probably be more inclined to find an acid house radio station than an 80s one to listen to it.