Today FM Megathread Mod warning post #1 / #1401

the strokes!

it’s very refreshing to hear 500 different songs all day….from time to time I listen to Tomorrowland Radio where they do a top 1000…all different songs which is great.

Wouldn't be a favorite of mine.

I'm starting to think the music boffins at Bauer has instructed some kind of weighting algorithms to ensure the songs on their current playlist rotation get higher pointing e.g. a vote for some generic pop song from mid-2000s gets 1 point-per-vote, a vote for Sabrina Carpenter gets 5 points-per-vote, etc, etc..

Listened most of the day yesterday and have been listening again this morning and it's very noticable that none of their current playlist are showing up in the lower placings.

Now you can put that down to recency bias if you like, but it would not surprise me that they've done something along those lines to justify their own existence.

I think there's a fair amount of their usual playlist sprinkled in, annoyingly.

Anyone wanna take a punt at Top 5?

Adele, Ed sheeran, Coldplay.

As above, definitely Mr Brightside in there

Surely Dave Moore's favourite song of the last 25 years, Apt. by Bruno Mars and someone else will be there. Yes he actually said that.

people please note that this is not a "chart" in the Top 500 sense - maybe from numbers 50 to 1 they will play the most popular songs and then it will be a chart of sorts.

Other than that it's a random list of songs.

No. Instead, what's happening here is the same thing they did for their two previous polls, which is to essentially promote a bunch of acts on the main voting page by presenting them to us and offering us three of their songs, and then forcing us to vote for at least one of them (in addition to the ones we pick by typing them in). This is why Queen went from Number 1 in their first Top 500 down to Number 85 in their Top 1000, because they weren't one of the chosen fifty being pushed into voters' faces. This is also the reason why Lover by Taylor Swift at 303 is followed immediately by Summer by Calvin Harris at 302; even though they ranked at 935 and 44 [sic] the last time, Summer's apparent slump is because it was one of his three promoted tracks the last time, and now it's not (he still has three but Summer isn't one of them this time). Similarly, at 301 this week we have Somebody Told Me by the Killers, which was 41 the last time. The drop is for the same reason. The Killers' other songs from last year were Human (65) and Mr Brightside (2), they're both the Anointed Trio for the band this time around, so expect them to chart high along with the third song All These Things That I've Done, which made it all the way to the heady heights of 270 last time around and hasn't featured yet this time, and will do probably on Monday in the higher places.

All in all, based on what I've seen in how they present their polls and in the results, I'm satisfied that there's no funny business in how they tot up their figures after the voting is finished, although it's clearly flawed up to when the polls actually close.

Otherwise, I didn't think I (or anyone) would be posting about this Top 500; by restricting it to the Top 500 I thought it would be just a glorified version of their usual playlist, but there's been some refreshing novelty to it, such as Hypersonic Missiles by Sam Fender (a sing I haven't heard before) and Your Love Alone Is Not Enough by Manic Street Preachers, a band that didn't make either of the station's previous two polls.

As if by magic, APT has just appeared on the countdown!

Not that i've seen but TodayFM said they'll be posting the 500 song listing after the No1 is announced

Really? That's not the impression I got from all the adverts they were running.

Am I imagining things or did they play "Low" by Flo rida twice in the countdown? It was played a few minutes ago, but I'm nearly certain it was played on Friday as well.

Played just before 1 pm on Friday, and shortly before 12 today. Good spot. What the hell is going on? Counting failure?

Apologies, it was clumsily put. I meant that with Dave Moore singing its praises, that could have been seen to be the precursor to its being announced as the number one song, but not anymore it will.