My charts are based on folk music airplay as revealed in playlists posted to the email list FOLKDJ-L. The charts are not based on sales or streams.
There are five parts to each chart: top albums, top songs, top artists, top record labels, and a list of the folk music DJs whose playlists were counted. The number in parens after a chart entry is the number of spins found by the program. For each album, some of the more popular tracks are listed and likewise the more popular albums for artists. At least one is shown. Charts are compiled weekly, monthly and annually. They are updated daily.
A playlist is a list of songs played, in order, on a radio show or streamed or a podcast. For each song, we need the name of the artist, the name of the song, and the name of the album that the song is from, or an indication that the song is a single. Many DJs include the record label as well. Other information, such as composer or year released, can be included, but will be ignored when compiling the charts.
Shows with playlists posted to FOLKDJ-L. The shows can be broadcast over the radio or a cable network, or streamed on the internet, or a podcast. As long as the playlist is posted to FOLKDJ-L, it counts.
Duplicate or near duplicate playlists are a problem. Often they are corrected playlists, which is fine. Don't repost the same playlist, even if your show is rerun or heard on anther station. If there are duplicate, or near duplicate playlists, only the latest is counted, if within the same month and no more than 8 days later.
All playlists are weighted equally - no attempt is made to weight by audience size. All folk DJs are considered equally worthy.
Put the word Playlist in the subject of the message. After it, put in parens the number of songs played on the show. Indicate who the host or dj is for the show (could be a stage name). This could be in the subject or in the body of the message. For the playlist itself, before you list the spins, have a line that tells the format you'll be using. For example:
Artist \ Song \ Album \ Label
Put punctuation between fields. Note that commas and hyphens are poor choices of punctuation as they often occur in artist, song and album names. This makes sorting out what is what difficult. Parentheses and (forward) slashes can be a problem, too. I like \ back slash or | vertical bar or -- double hyphen.
FOLKDJ-L requires messages to be in plain text, not formatted. That means no bold, no italic, no fonts, no pictures, no fonts, etc. Just lines of letters, numbers and punctuation marks (accented characters are fine). If a message is not in plain text, it will be auto-converted to plain text which can garble the message.
Be consistent in your format - don't change halfway down your playlist. Don't put Various Artists as the artist name - give the actual artist name for the song. The chart program will figure out the Various Artists thing. Finally, we'd like to know what radio station or where to hear your show, and what part of the country or world your show is coming from.
Songs must be from a recording, either a single or a track from an album. Songs played live in the radio studio don't count. We're trying to assess the popularity of recorded music, so other DJs can play it. Songs marked as Theme, Intro, Outro, Midtro or Music Bed are also not counted. Singles are not counted as albums, but EPs are.
Messages are first scanned and sorted into playlists and non-playlists. For playlists, the program figures out from the text of the message who the DJ is, what playlist format they are using, their affiliation and location. If something changes, it's usually not a problem, and in most cases new DJs are included right away.
The date a playlist is counted is not the date that the show aired, but rather the date of the message containing the playlist. Also note that the moderation process can add a delay to the process of posting a message.
The FOLKDJ-L listserv is hosted by the Pennsylvania State University. Pennsylvania is in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States. Because of time zones and the International Date Line, messages may arrive at Penn State on a different date than is marked on the email. For example: a message sent at 10pm from California will arrive in Pennsylvania at 1am the next day. When it's 9pm in Pennsylvania, it's already the next day in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. The charts go by the date the email arrives at Penn State.
My chart system scrapes playlists from the FOLKDJ-L archives at Penn State. The archives categorize messages by week, month and year. The first week of a month is day 1 to day 7, the second week is 8 thru 14, the third week is 15-21 and the fourth week is 22-28. The fifth week is always a short week of 1 to 3 days. February in a non-leap year doesn't have a fifth week.
My system usually just adds up all the spins for an artist, song or album. A problem occurs when one DJ is the only one playing it - normally popular items get spins from many DJs. To prevent a single DJ from unduly influencing the chart, I have the following rule: if more than half the spins come from a single DJ, the count for that DJ is limited to the sum of plays from all the other DJs, plus one. For example: an album gets one spin from DJ A, two spins from DJ B, and 25 spins from DJ C, and no spins at all from the 100+ other DJs. In this case, DJ C is limited to 4 spins, and the album total would be 7, not 28. If this case, the count would be listed as (7/28) instead of (28).
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I'm Richard Gillmann, the host of "The Real Folk" broadcast at 91.3fm on KBCS radio in Bellevue, WA, and streaming at KBCS.FM. The show airs every Sunday 6-8pm. You can also stream archived shows for up to two weeks after air date (also available as a podcast on MixCloud). A bit of history: I started my folk music career at KBCS in 1997, as one of five weekday hosts of "Lunch With Folks". Almost immediately I wanted to know what albums were trending so I didn't miss anything. Being a software developer, I started writing a program to calculate a chart based on folk music airplay reported to FOLKDJ-L. It was harder than I had first thought and required a lot of manual adjustments, but it worked. Time passed and management at KBCS cancelled "Lunch With Folks". I got a new show called "The Outskirts". That was cancelled after a year or so, and being without a show, after awhile I turned over my old charts and the website folkradio.org to Folk Alliance. They have kept it going ever since. In 2020, I got a new show on KBCS "The Real Folk" and I decided to develop a new folk airplay chart program from scratch. The idea was to have a completely automated system that would update every day and include weekly charts in addition to the monthly and annual charts. In this way, DJs would have more current information available. The new charts are unofficial. They are a personal project of mine. |
