CMJ ISSUE 1368 WEEK 43 RECAP

Hello everyone, thank you for stopping by! This time last year Dr. Dog was our #1 record at college radio and we would only have one more number one record the rest of the year as Arcade Fire took over.

I started to look over the archives at college radio and found that the end of the year has typically ended with some record taking over and holding on until the end.
2005--My Morning Jacket, held on to the #1 spot for the last 4 weeks
2008--Of Montreal held the #1 spot for the last 5 weeks
2009--Tegan And Sara had the #1spot for 5 of the last 6 weeks
2010--Sufjan Stevens had the #1 spot 4 of the last 6 weeks
2011--M83 held the #1 spot the last 6 weeks

So not every year but a majority of years one record takes over towards the end of the year.  I would guess it has a lot to do with music directors getting hammered with school work or just that some of the best records are released at the end of the year.  So what will take over for the end of this year? We have already had 2 nice runs from King Tuff and Ty Segall leading up to this point. Could Caribou or Deerhoof take us to the end of the year? Or will it be something else?

While looking back over the years of #1's I noticed this weeks #1 record had 187 stations charting it out of 294 reporting.  The first thing that struck me was that yet again we had a week where we did not reach 300 reporters.  This year we have had only one week where we had over 300 reporters. Last year we had SIXTEEN.  Looking back even further I found that in 2009 Animal collective was #1 with an average of 280 stations charting the record each week. Crazy that there were more stations on a single record in 2009 than there are reporters now.

I believe I have gone over this before but it bears repeating. This year there have been 414 reporters to CMJ. Last year there were 449. So where are they going? I reached out to some stations that no longer report a few weeks ago and not shockingly I have yet to hear back. I have to imagine that CMJ is trying to get ahold of them too.

So what is the big deal? Less reporters means I can concentrate on those that are reporting on a regular basis right? In theory sure.  But let's look at how the landscape of college radio has changed over the years.

In 2005 there were an average of 441 reporters a week, with a high of 554 and a low of 176 ( first week of the year) Overall there were 678 stations that reported that year. There were fewer promotions companies at that time as well. So we had less records being worked and more stations to promote those records to.  This means each record had more opportunities.

Needless to say since 2005 the average has fallen every year.  We can take a quick look at the Average reporter per week

2005--441
2006--395
2007--364
2008--335
2009--303
2010--310
2011--277
2012--274
2013--269
2014--259

So we have on average now 259 reporters a week but now we have roughly double the promotion companies with some working upwards of 8 new records in a single week yet we still only have 30 spots on each chart.  Seems like it might be overwhelming to be a radio station music director.  This is why it is more important than ever to report on a weekly basis.  Every station matters to creating the best chart that can be created.

So on to this weeks recap.  King Tuff holds on to the #1 spot again. I thought this would be the week that Caribou took over but maybe they just don't want it enough. Kidding of course. But I would think they still have a very good shot to take over and could be that record that holds on throughout the end of the year.  Foxygen and Alt-J both took a slight step back. At the end of the year though there is really nothing holding a company from pushing until the very end.  Flying Lotus did jump up into the top 3 but with the same company working both Caribou and Flying Lotus and a second indie on Caribou I have to imagine Caribou being the priority.

The ADDS were pretty close with Deerhoof taking #1 by 3 adds over Panda Bear.  I would not be shocked if both of these records end up in the top 5 in the next few weeks.

Thank you for reading! lets talk about all this soon on the twitter. 

douglas