Whenever Jennie and I are in the car together, we will listen to the local Top-40 radio station (KISS 108). One top-40 artist that i can recognize reliably is Katy Perry. It seems like we can’t drive very far before we are listening to Teenage Dreams, Firework or California Gurls. That got me wondering what the average Time To Katy Perry (TTKP) was on the station and how it compared to other radio stations. So I fired up my Python interpreter, wrote some code to pull the data from the fabulous YES api and answer this very important question. With the YES API I can get the timestamped song plays for a station for the last 7 days. I gathered this data from WXKS (Kiss 108), did some calculations to come up with this data:
- Total songs played per week: 1,336
- Total unique songs: 184
- Total unique artists: 107
- Average songs per hour: 7
- Number of Katy Perry plays: 76
- Median Time between Katy Perry songs: 1hour 18 minutes
That means the average Time to Katy Perry is about 39 minutes.
Katy Perry is only the fourth most played artist on KISS 108. Here are the stats for the top 10:
| Artist | Plays | Median time between plays |
Average time to next play |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taio Cruz | 84 | 1:07 | 0:34 |
| Rihanna | 80 | 1:27 | 0:44 |
| Usher | 79 | 1:20 | 0:40 |
| Katy Perry | 76 | 1:18 | 0:39 |
| Bruno Mars | 73 | 1:30 | 0:45 |
| Nelly | 56 | 1:44 | 0:52 |
| Mike Posner | 56 | 1:57 | 0:59 |
| Pink | 47 | 2:20 | 1:10 |
| Lady Gaga | 47 | 1:59 | 1:00 |
| Taylor Swift | 41 | 2:17 | 1:09 |
I took a look at some of the other top-40 stations around the country to see which has the lowest TTKP:
| Station | Songs Per Hour | TTKP |
|---|---|---|
| KIIS – LA’s #1 hit music station | 8 | 39 mins |
| WHTZ- New York’s #1 hit music station | 9 | 48 mins |
| WXKS- Boston’s #1 hit music station | 7 | 39 mins |
| WSTR- Atlanta – Always #1 for Today’s Hit Music | 8 | 38 mins |
| KAMP- 97.1 Amp Radio – Los Angeles | 11 | 38 mins |
| KCHZ- 95.7 – The Beat of Kansas City | 11 | 32 mins |
| WFLZ- 93.3 – Tampa Bay’s Hit Music channe | 9 | 39 mins |
| KREV- 92.7 – The Revolution – San Francisco | 11 | 36 mins |
So, no matter where you are, if you have a radio, you can tune into the local top-40 radio station, and you’ll need to wait, on average, only about 40 minutes until a Katy Perry song comes on. Good to know.
Music Machinery 
#1 by Tom on November 10, 2010 - 9:29 am
Very nice, although the correct terminology is surely MTTKP (mean time to Katy Perry).
There will of course be lots of stations with an infinite MTTKP, based on available data, but I bet there are some amusing exceptions. I wonder what the MTTKP of BBC Radio 3 is, for example – she must have showed up on Late Junction at least once, probably in between some Debussy and some Albanian nose flute.
#2 by Tom on November 10, 2010 - 9:30 am
Actually maybe that should be MTBKP (mean time between … ). Or MPTTKP (most probable time to … )