Had a random thought where there seemed to be songs that would be played every single day but then all of a sudden, just stopped. I have noticed some digital station websites would have a playlist of songs that were played on that day but is there one where you enter an obscure song and it would tell if it was played at all within the last week at all?
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Aren’t there hundreds of radio stations just in London alone?
I know I have an internet radio app and that list is thousands long.
I can well imagine the time, effort and expense needed to gather all that “now playing” data from thousands of radio stations for basically hardly anyone to ever look at wouldn’t be worth anyone’s time.
If I was you, I’d pick my favourite, say, five stations, keep an eye on their weekly playlist and refer back to it when you’ve not heard a particular banger for a while.
Does the data exist? Yeah probably via music licensing.
Is it open to anyone to go look at? Doubtful.
How far back would it go? Who knows?
Companies like [PPL](https://www.ppluk.com/) (one of the largest music licensing companies in UK) track radio station plays for the purpose of gathering the royalties.
There’s nothing obvious on their site that would let you make the query you describe, not that I’ve delved too deeply.
A programmer with a month of time and a good few Scrapers can come a long way. Hella expensive though.
Ive often thought of doing something that would track how many times a song gets played on any particular station, scrape the web page that shows whats “playing now” every couple of minutes. If the current result is the same as the previous one, bin it, when it sees a new song, log it in a database and then run some statistical output to a webpage.
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I mean, im sure there’s a lot more nuance to it than that… im also not a programmer so im sure there are some glaring oversights I’ve made here
If anyone has the data it would be Radiomonitor. Not sure how far back they keep their data and it’s probably not something they make publicly available (as it has commercial value to all sorts of businesses like record labels).
> Had a random thought where there seemed to be songs that would be played every single day but then all of a sudden, just stopped.
They’ll have moved down the chain. You’ll find lots of really old stuff on R2,3,4, local BBC Radio, local stations.