Today FM Megathread Mod warning post #1 / #1401

Enjoying the top 500, especially the lack of repetition.

I don't think they would've gotten enough votes to properly rank all 500 so I'm sure there's a producer bias in there in some form, and some questionable decisions!

Flogging the lanzarote trip to death this weekend

I wonder how much discussion was involved in compiling and ordering this list within the station. If they dedicated one minute to deciding the order of each song, that’s over eight hours of discussion. Just composing a list of 500 songs would take some amount of time without imagining ordering it.

I didn’t see how they got people to vote on the list. Was it a list of 500 songs and you picked your favourites or could you input your own suggestions?

Who would you replace them with?

99.9% sure Jessica Maciel wasn't fired, she decided to quit/retire from full time radio to focus on her own tattoo businesses instead.

Definitely - I really very much doubt there is a genuine full list of 500 songs as voted by listeners. The whole thing got very little promotion in advance - I listen to a lot of radio, and only heard it advertised a handful of times - so I'd bet there are dozens of songs in there that all have exactly the same number of votes (or just 1 vote!), and the list was then added to by looking at other such lists, and then letting the presenters loose on it.

Yup! Knowing I'm unlikely to hear that Megan Traynor song at all, or Antihero more than once a day is a great incentive to keep listening! 😁

I wondered if they had a list up (ok, I was curious where Stairway to Heaven featured, if at all, and how many Beatles and Stones made it, and where!) so had a look at the website... https://www.todayfm.com/all_music (right now, it's a 404-page not found error message...)

Beyoncé was number 3? Wow!

https://www.todayfm.com/best-bits/vote-for-your-favourite-song-of-all-time-in-our-egg-cellent-easter-countdown-1449285

Probably because when they started, it was really, really hard to get a .ie, and so loads of companies and other businesses just didn't bother (now, it's gone the opposite way, and it's way too easy to get a .ie - there are dozens of 'shopify' front-end websites based in China and elsewhere and nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland, but they have their .ie domain - but that's a separate issue).

I know they were likely limited in what they could include but there are six Niall Horan songs and four One Direction songs on that list. That means Niall Horan is involved with at least 2% of the top 500 songs in the world?

There's not a single Elvis song on there, or Franz Ferdinand or Blink 182 either. I could name a few songs by those alone that deserve a spot above Niall Horan's 'This Town'

@Declan A Walsh you're right that it's an eclectic mix but as you said, most bands or artists on the list don't have just one song on it.

Looking at the top five songs, each of those artists have multiple songs on the list. Queen have four songs, U2 have 11, Beyonce has four, Snow Patrol has four and Taylor Swift has five. That's 28 songs out of 500 that are made up by the same five bands/artists.

Going down to the next five, The Killers have four, Adele has four, Ed Sheeran has nine, Oasis have six and Madonna has five. That's 28 more songs by the people at 6-10 on the list.

If 56 songs on the list are made up by those in the top 10 of the list, that means you had a one in ten chance of hearing another song by the people in the top ten at any point across the weekend.

It seems more likely that they made a list of roughly 100 artists and decided to pick four to six songs from most of them to scatter across the few days, rather than they actually made a list of the top 500 songs.

Did anyone actually vote in the thing? I remember hearing just a couple of ads for it, wasn't paying too much attention, and didn't go to the website. Was it a form you picked songs from, or could you submit your own entries?