Diagnosing Anomalous Song Playback Frequency

News

This week, we looked into an issue where a very small subset of songs are playing more often than they should on the station. For more details, read on!

Some listeners have told us they’ve noticed the same songs playing on the station which is surprising since we have a system designed for variety, so let’s look into what’s happening.

First, let’s review some details about how the station’s rotation currently works. The radio station has a large music library which gets trimmed through a few different processes. Ultimately, the last step is to determine what songs are placed in the station’s active playlist, also known as the rotation. The rotation is partially cycled every week where some songs are removed and others are added. The process for this considers the amount of times a song has been played compared to the rest of the library, as well as how recently a song has been played.

When all works well, this results in all songs being played regularly over time and helps newly added songs get more attention by staying in the rotation for longer. However, this depends on a couple of things being true: songs must be correctly identified and logged, and cycling songs must use current song history data. At this point, we’ve identified fewer than 10 songs which have anomalous playback, meaning something in the decision chain for station playback is broken for these specific songs. Instead of playing every x days at maximum, they’re playing up to 6x more often than they should be.

Now that we’ve identified the specific songs involved, we can start working on a solution and use these to test and confirm the results, so that’s what we’ll be working on this week. That’s all for now, be back with more soon, and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #182]

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