Once again it’s the “official” birthday for KMAG. I was nowhere close to the goal of 7000 songs. I fell short by over 600 tunes. As always, I’m distraught over it. Now I just think I’m ahead by over 300 for last year! I will always feel good about it as it still operates from a playlist larger than any commercial entity. Recently, my casual observations of BobFM (the Austin version of Fred or whatever the oldies format is called in your area) have made me be a bit more generous to it; it may be working from a larger catalog than most formats but mine still dwarfs it. Even Bob removes songs from its rotation, normally recent hits while KMAG continues to grow as nothing is thrown aside.
I updated it yesterday but I don’t know how many songs it had played other than it was past 668,000. I did check for the “winner” on which one was number 666,666: “Really Really Happy” by the Muffs. Some people think the band’s female singer has a hellish voice. It’s definitely an acquired taste like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Any upcoming changes? The only immediate one will be scaling back the number of Onion stories from seven to five since they play reruns on the weekends now. Fine by me, it’ll save me some time because the podcast versions have to be modified to work as “regular” MP3 files. I’m a third of the way done breaking down 2006’s results. I have been kicking around changing the weights on songs based upon their age or genre to keep it from sounding similar to the abhorrent Bob. So far that hasn’t proven necessary as KMAG’s Top 30 pushes through frequently enough and the bulk of the stream leans in an “Alternative” direction, for lack of a better pigeon hole. With all the questions I get from my wife and friends, I think I should call it Obscure Pop, unless someone’s taken the label already.