Finding the Rhythm

For months now, I’ve been hoping to finish designing and programming a web application that would let me make the maintenance of my Top 25 Dance Chart easier. Making them manually is a pain in the butt, frankly, and it’s way more subjective than I’d like it to be. Since the dance music industry has enough politics going on inside of it to make the presidential election season look tame in comparison, I really wanted to try and remove as much subjectivity from the process as I could. And yes, I acknowledge, at the end of the day, a lot of what I choose to spin is based on my personal preferences, as it is with any DJ; but I wanted it to be as accurate and removed from “who do I like this week?” as I could.

While I’m weeks late in delivering it, I finally did, this week. You can see the results at http://www.djwesley.com/chart/.

The chart is based solely on play frequency data from the past six week period, which I selected because it’s a decent sized sampling, and it would help damp some of the “I got this new song this week and I love it so I play it all the time” effect. Play frequency is obviously based on my choices, but that’s also a reflection of audience response, and also factored-in are specific audience requests.

Throughout the week, I’ll upload playlist history data straight from my DJ’ing software of choice. Then each Friday, the web site will automagically generate an updated chart. So make the above URL one of your weekly stops.

At some point, I’ll see about putting it all into an RSS feed for those of you who are as web-geeky as I obviously am.

Anyway, thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.