Richard Gillmann's Top Folk Airplay Lists
Introduction

These lists are compiled and posted to the FOLKDJ-L web site every month
(since October 1997).  The archive of past Top Album lists is available
at folkradio.org (the official FOLKDJ-L web site) and also at
nwfolk.com (my web site).

The process of compiling the Top Albums list is automated (I do hand
correct some obvious errors and typos). The results are based on
playlists posted to FOLKDJ-L during the calendar month. I wrote a pair
of programs that work with the Eudora email program's filtering feature.
One program parses each playlist as it comes in and adds it to a
spreadsheet. The second program processes the spreadsheet into a readable
report. Playlists have to include artist, song and album name (label is
optional) and be in a reasonably regular format for my program to be able
to parse them. My programs wind up identifying about 65% of the songs
actually posted.

The Top Albums list is sorted in descending order by number of plays
recorded for each album. Within an album, the number of times each of
the more popular tracks were played is shown. If a single DJ is the only
one mostly playing an album, the count of plays is adjusted downwards;
otherwise the raw counts are used. The top 70 albums are listed.

Richard Gillmann
richard@folkradio.org