KEENER Q&A: These days, the music lists I hear on rock radio stations seem both short and predictable. Are the playlists as top secret today as they used to be?
In the old days, we used to wait for the WKNR Music Guide to see what music was hot in Motown. And the tweaks the Paul Cannon made to the playlist were some of the best kept secrets in town. Competitors would sometimes hire visually impaired folks to keep logs of what music was played where so that a station could effectively counter-program. Nowdays the info is all available to the public at websites like Joel Denver's AllAccess.com. You can track the number of spins a particular record gets on a particular radio station. If you want to know who's trading what MP3s on the web, bigchampagne.com is the place.