One Thousand Song Weekend

Do the radio stations you listen to advertise “One Thousand Song Weekends”? The station I listen to makes such a claim; and I’ve heard it on other stations and in other cities. And it really bothers me that they make such a claim, because not only is it not reasonable, I think it is false advertising.

A weekend is composed of 48 hours, Saturday and Sunday. Let’s assume that a typical song is about 3.5 minutes (actually, I think it is more, but let’s give the radio station the benefit of the doubt for now), so let’s see, it take 3500 minutes to play 1000 songs, and 3500 minutes is 58 1/3 hours. Can you spot a problem here? But wait, let’s be liberal, let’s include Friday night from the time work ends up through midnight as part of the weekend. That’s seven more hours, now the weekend is 55 hours and it still takes 58 1/3 hours to play 1000 songs.

Let’s get even more liberal on our definition of weekend. Let’s add in the first seven hours of Monday morning. Now, I know, most people don’t consider this the weekend, but during this time most people aren’t working and they aren’t preparing to go to work. So now a weekend is 62 hours, and they are going to play 58 1/3 hours of music. That leaves about three and one-half minutes per hour for non-music — things like talking, commercials, promos, news, weather and non-music programming. It still doesn’t wash. I don’t believe it.

How can radio stations get away with this ridiculous claim? Why isn’t this false advertising? Obviously, Western civilization will collapse if this continues. And you heard it here first.