Triple J Week – Monday 25 October

Originally when I was considering spending the week listening to Triple J it was to do a follow-up piece to the day I spent listening to Nova and look at how much music gets played, where it’s from and how much of it is major label, how much is independent. However, with Nova it was easy to find out what was being played as it popped up on my iPod Screen and a quick check meant I could usually find out the record label fairly effortlessly in most cases (as seen in the photo in the post about Nova).

Triple J make it really hard to even find out what the bands and songs being played are; sure they might tell you what’s coming up but it doesn’t mean it’s in the right order or even that there aren’t a whole load of other songs in there that they didn’t tell you about. Then they give you a run down of what they’ve played every four of five songs but again it does’t mean they’ve included everything or that they’ve told you in the right order. It makes it incredibly difficult to link a song to a title and a band in a lot of cases; maybe that’s why Triple J’s forum has so many posts by people asking what the song is and posting a selection of lyrics to help identify it.

At various times during the day you’ll hear three main boasts: We Love Music, We Love New Music, We Love Australian Music. Two of these are without question, the other more debatable.

Anywhere, here’s what happened.

• I listened to Triple J from 9am to 5:30pm (Triple J’s News/Current Affairs programme, Hack, starts at 5:30pm).
• During that time I listened to 114 songs, played by 114 artists. No bands were repeated, no songs were repeated.
• This works out as 13.41 songs/hour. In my day listening to Nova, I listened to 110 songs by 72 artists (in 30 minutes more), 12.22 songs/hour. This doesn’t really mean much, all depends on how much of a song you play but showed you got an extra song an hour on Triple J than on Nova.
• Triple J love Australian music: 50% of the songs played during the day were by Australian acts.
• Triple J love new music: over 78% of songs played were from 2010 and only one song (Frenzal Rhomb’s Never Had So Much Fun) was from before the 2000s.

The full breakdown of songs played by nationality of act is in the following table:

The full breakdown of songs played by year released is in the following table:

Triple J is always being accused of Sydney bias. The 8½ hours spent listening to the station on Monday showed Melbourne leading the way, followed by Sydney and then Perth. And Brisbane? Languishing way behind in fourth place with only two Brisbane acts played during the day, beaten out of sight by Perth and its eight plays. The full breakdown by city/area is in the following table:

The two Brisbane songs played? ‘Overpass‘ by John Steel Singers and ‘Final Day’ by Numbers Radio. Yep, that was my reaction too.

by ed

Justin Edwards is a regular contributor to Brisbane's weekly street press magazine, Rave and his photographs have also been published in Rolling Stone, Plan B magazine, Mess+Noise, the Herald-Sun and Blunt, as well as on numerous music and band websites.

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