Name That Tune

Music radio stations only hear from their listeners on two occasions:  when they want to request a song and when they have a question about the identity of a song (okay, they also call when there’s a contest).  The identification part has become much simpler thanks to the Internet.  Most radio Web sites publish a playlist of the most popular tracks of the week (refer to Bay Area Radio for our comprehensive radio guide).  For those interested in the actual number of spins a song has received weekly at a particular radio station, they can check out the station’s monitored airplay at Radio & Records (radioandrecords.com).

What happens if you’re still not sure after reviewing a current playlist?  And what about recurrents for which radio stations do not normally provide a playlist?  You can verify any song by searching the Internet for audio samples and lyrics.  Radio’s solution is to display information about a song in real time as you listen to it.  Until such time when everyone has a radio receiver with this type of display capability, the Internet has come to the rescue.

Some radio Web sites continuously update a list of songs played during the last hour.  That’s a good start, but what they need to do is archive such a list for at least the previous 12 hours.  If you have a question while you’re driving, you may not be able to check the Internet immediately.  That’s why this log needs to be maintained for more than one hour.  YES Networks (yes.com) has done just that for radio stations that are already electronically monitored:  It compiles and updates a station’s real-time playlist for the past 24 hours (there’s a 15-minute delay between the time a song airs and when its ID appears).

As technology continues to improve and become widely available, radio station switchboards may never have to answer another question about a song.

One-Stop Browsing for Your Convenience

We have compiled below a set of YES tool bars for all the local radio stations in the regions surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area that are currently monitored by YES Networks.

Note that some songs may be incorrectly identified.  For instance, they may be attributed to the DJs who put together compilation albums instead of the actual artists.  This is a clerical error—not a problem with the audio-matching technology.

Beware that if a song is not in the database, however, it will simply be ignored.  It’s understandable that no airplay-tracking service could possibly recognize every song on the radio all the time.  Any automated system would be stumped by a mix show; it’s a good thing radio stations have begun to publish their mix show playlists.  Instead of leaving an imperceptible gap in the time line, YES Networks should clearly tag any failed identification—it’s worse to gloss over missing data.

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