COLLEGE RADIO RECAP WEEK 23 CMJ ISSUE 1396

Hello everyone! We have a new number one! My Morning Jacket have busted on though Alabama Shakes to take the #1 spot.  Congrats go out to the team over at The Syn, they have had a string of "not quite" so it has to feel good to break through.  Not that we should feel bad they have been working great records but as a wise man once told me there are 3 numbers he never wants to see in a report, 2, 6, 11.  The worst three numbers you can be on the chart.

The question now is how long can they hold on? Summer can be a time of slow movement so while Thee Oh Sees is knocking on the door at #2 there is a chance My Morning Jacket could hold on. Getting stations on board tends to take a bit longer and getting them to move on from a record also takes a bit longer.

Aside from Thee Oh Sees, Hot chip remains in contention but everything else looks pretty far away. Girlpool comes in at #12 and Sharon Van Etten at #21 and the highest debut of the week is Dawes at #41. It will take a  few weeks before any of these make a run at the top.

For this weeks ADDS we had another pretty weak ADD week with the top add getting only 71 adds. Pins was that #1.  In looking back I cannot find a record that has received under 75 adds ever making it to #1.  A few years ago the Decemberists in the second week of the year, so low reporting week anyways, got 85 ADDS but that is the lowest I can find.

We had a nice discussion on twitter last night about the CMJ charts and rankings. I encourage you to look back at it www.twitter.com/theanimalarrg  Some of the fun I thought was the discussion on if you can tell the difference between a station that is weighted 1 and a station that is weighted 5.

Here are the stations I gave. Let me know if you can tell the difference ( if you don't already know)

WGBK WCSB KRTU KPSU KDHX WCYT

The general discussion started because, and I am going to simplify, there are a lot of 1 weighted stations that do great jobs and are great people and in almost equal proportion there are a lot of 5 weighted stations that are rude and unresponsive and as a promoter you end up wishing the 1 was the 5 and vice versa.   While I do wish we could put a weight on niceness it does not work that way.  But rankings can change. As good as it would feel to call out stations that have been jerks in the past I will refrain, but there have been many occasions where a stations have been downgraded and there is nothing better than seeing it happen to a jerk.

Another point of discussion came from the new GM of CMJ :

"should pointed out that in many ways CMJ is playlist agnostic when it comes to weight

we are not an arbiter of taste in that respect. Charts report, not editorialize"

It is an interesting point for sure. The Charts do report but because of the weight system we can get a skewed view of what is happening at college radio. I do miss the days of the Core chart and the spins chart that gave us alternative views of what is happening at radio. Perhaps even an unweighted chart would be nice to see.  The good thing is that CMJ has shown in the past they are not afraid to change with college radio changing around them. So hopefully we see some changes in the near future.

Thanks for reading!

Happy summer.

Don't work on Fridays its nice outside.