How #1 is #1?

For chart wonks and stats freaks only...

So, Kelly Clarkson is #1 at Top 40 radio in the US this week, as I reported yesterday in my weekly US chart analysis. This is based on the Radio and Records tally, which aggregates spin data from every CHR/POP station (CHR means "Contemporary Hits Radio" aka Top 40) in the country. But how consistent is that across the country?

I decided to investigate to what extent the national chart matched up against the CHR/POP charts of the largest US cities. To do so, I used data from Mediabase's Mainstream Hit chart and sortable database(comparable to R&R and easier to manipulate). I have not been able to figure out what the difference is between Mediabase's "CHR/POP" chart and "Mainstream Hit" charts, other than that Mainstream Hit appears to include more stations and is easier to use on the Mediabase site.

Sample

According to Radio and Records, these are the CHR/POP stations in 10 largest US markets:
1. New York, NY (WHTZ)
2. Los Angeles, CA (KIIS)
3. Chicago, IL (WKSC)
4. San Francisco, CA (Yikes! Doesn't have a CHR/POP station)
5. Dallas/Fort-Worth, TX (KHKS)
6. Philadelphia, PA (WIOQ)
7. Houston, TX (KRBE)
8. Washington, DC (WIHT)
9. Boston, MA (WXKS)
10. Detroit, MI (WKQI)
And I'll add one more so I have a 10 city sample to make up for San Francisco...
11. Atlanta, GA (WSTR)

Predictions

As of the 7-day period ending today, "Because of You" has 9830 spins, which puts it 250 spins ahead of #2 ("Gold Digger") and about 1000 spins ahead of #3 ("Run it"), and and 4800 spins ahead of #10 ("Don't Forget About Us"). Based on that, I would expect there's a pretty good chance that these 10 station's #1 hits could be Kelly Clarkson or Kanye West, but a lesser chance that it would be any other songs.

Because my sample is the largest cities, and counting "spins" gives every station equal footing on the chart, I resorted the chart by "audience impressions." Doing so gives stations with more listeners (typically in larger cities) an advantage in the make up of the chart. I wanted to see if there was much difference, and there really was not, except to see that Sean Paul's "We Be Burnin'," which is #11 by spins is #7 by audience impressions, which leads me to believe that big cities play Sean Paul more, and perhaps he will chart higher in my sample. Kelly Clarkson was still #1, so her audience is about 3 percent larger than Kanye's and also about twice as large as the audience for #10 (still Mariah)

Results

Interesting. Of the CHR/POP stations in the 10 largest US cities with such stations, "Because of You" was #1 at only one of them (Atlanta). It was #2 at 2 stations, #3 at 5 stations, and #4 at 1. It did not appear in the top 10 at all in Detroit (where it was #16). Even at "Because of You's" format leaders (the 10 stations that played it the most), it was #1 in only 1 (Richmond). Among the 10 sample stations, "Gold Digger" was the most common #1 (4 stations), followed by "Run It" (3 stations).

The #1 songs at the sample stations were:
1. New York ("Gold Digger")
2. Los Angeles ("Run It")
3. Chicago ("Run It")
5. Dallas ("Run It")
6. Philadelphia ("We Be Burnin'")
7. Houston ("Gold Digger")
8. Washington ("Gold Digger")
9. Boston ("Gold Digger")
10. Detroit ("Soul Survivor")
11. Atlanta ("Because of You")

I was right about Sean Paul. "We be Burnin" was the most common non-national top 10 to appear in these stations' top 10s (6 stations), and was even #1 in Philadelphia. None of the stations top 10s contained the same 10 songs as the national list, as there were at least 3 songs that different at each station (Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, and Boston were the closests, with only 3 songs each that were different). Detroit had the most variance, with 7 songs in its top 10 (including its #1, "Sour Survivor") that weren't in the national 10 top. Among the 10 stations, there were 25 different songs in their top 10s that didn't appear in the national top 10, led by Sean Paul (6), Beyonce's "Check on it" (3), and Akon's "Belly Dancer" (3). "Because of You" and "Run It" each appeared in 9 of the station's top 10's; least common of the national top 10 songs to appear was "Wake Me Up When September Ends," which only appeared in Atlanta's top 10. This actually isn't surprising, since it was the song that fell out of the national top 10 to admit Sean Paul when I adjusted it to measure audience impressions instead of spins.

Conclusion

Because of the number of CHR/POP stations in the US (I don't know how many, but I would assume several hundred), it would appear that it counts more chartwise to get your song played on lots of stations than it does to get it played a lot at just a few. Kelly Clarkson is not #1 in many of the 10 largest cities, or even among the cities that play her the most, but I imagine that she has good breadth of coverage nationally. There's also a decent amount of variance among the stations' playlists, which is good news for those who bemoan the increasingly homogenous nature of radio. At least they're getting some choice in how much they play songs, if not what they play.