Most music charts are built from data you cannot see: sales reported by retailers, streams counted by the platforms, airplay detected by a monitoring company on a panel of stations. Ours is built from something anyone can check — the song title a station broadcasts along with its own audio. This post explains how that works, and, just as importantly, what it cannot tell you.
Where the song titles come from
Most internet radio streams use a protocol that dates back to the late 1990s and the Shoutcast and Icecast servers. As well as the audio, the stream can carry a small block of text every few seconds' worth of sound, and stations use it to send the title of whatever is playing. It is how your car or your media player knows what song is on.
Every few minutes our server opens each station's stream, asks for that metadata, reads the first block — usually after around 16 to 32 kilobytes of audio — and hangs up. It is the same thing a listener's player does, for a moment. That one short check tells us two things: what is playing, and whether the station is on the air at all.
Cleaning up
Stations use that text field for all sorts of things besides song titles: their own name during ad breaks, the time, a web address, "Now Playing info goes here", or the name of an audio file. We throw all of that away. We only log something as a play when it looks like a song, and we only count the artist when the title has the usual "Artist – Title" shape.
We then group an artist's name across its different spellings — "GEORGE STRAIT", "George Strait (Live)", "George Strait feat. …" — and show the most common one.
How the chart ranks
Our chart ranks artists by reach: the number of different stations that played them in the last seven days. Plays are the tie-breaker. We do it this way because some stations in our directory are devoted to a single artist — there are stations that play nothing but the Eagles, or Taylor Swift — and a chart built on raw plays would let one station top it on its own.
We also only count stations we are reasonably confident play country. A station that tags itself "country" among a dozen other genres is left out.
What it cannot tell you
Our chart is useful, but it has real limits, and we would rather you knew them.
- It is not weighted by audience. A big-city FM station with a million listeners counts the same as a one-person internet station. Billboard's Country Airplay chart weights plays by estimated audience; ours does not, because we cannot measure it.
- We sample. We check each station every few minutes. A song shorter than the gap between checks can be missed, so small differences between artists are not meaningful.
- Not every station sends titles. About a third of the stations in our directory either send no song data or send something we cannot use. Their plays are invisible to us.
- Networks move together. Some companies run dozens of stations from the same playlist. When one programming decision puts a song on fifty stations at once, it shows up here as fifty stations — which is true, but is one decision, not fifty.
- The metadata can be wrong. Stations sometimes swap artist and title, or leave an old title up after the song has changed. We catch the common mistakes, not all of them.
- It is not American-only. Our chart includes country stations in the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere, and classic country stations as well as hit stations. That is why legends like George Strait and Alan Jackson sit so high.
Why we bothered
Because it lets us show you something no other directory can: what every station is playing before you tune in, a playlist for every station, and a chart drawn from the whole breadth of country radio rather than the few hundred stations the industry monitors. It is our data, gathered ourselves, and we publish exactly how.
You can see the results on the chart, on every station's page, and live on On air now. If you run a station and think we have got something wrong, tell us.