Finding the Rhythm

This week’s chart is a little early since I will be out of town tomorrow, Friday, the date I normally cut over the new ones.

Before I get into any observations, I should note that I retroactively corrected a track naming error that resulted in Nicole Scherzinger’s track, Baby Love, not getting ranked properly. (Damned typos!) In any case, she would have been #18 last week.

I know I’m obsessing a bit about the chart, but now that it’s been running awhile, I’m fascinated by the results one gets when the chart is basically a data report, the result of a query, and not something I make by hand. Case in point: Filo & Peri hovered around the top position on the chart with Anthem, and then precipitously fell off completely, only to be added back this week as a “new entry.” In looking at the underlying data, it’s high chart position was really due to a huge amount of play frequency back in January, and spotty play since. While I play a lot of gigs each week, I think the fact that I often get new music and play it frequently when it’s new will inevitably cause both huge leaps up and down, and likely will also cause certain tracks to hover around the top and then fall dramatically, as I saw with Filo & Peri.

Call me a data geek. I’m often fascinated by minutia like this.

Anyway, in terms of observations, no surprises that Ron Perkov and Idina Menzel held their same positions this week. In fact, there’s not many surprises at all on the chart, except, perhaps, that Tony Moran and Martha Wash popped-in at #17 with a song that’s actually been out and that I’ve been playing consistently for months. (Another one of those results of basing the chart on play frequency.)

Among the hot adds this week are a few I really like:

• Romanian Elena Baltagan (or just “Elena” according to the record label) makes a strong appearance with Before I Sleep. The available mixes are strong, the vocal is good, and I suspect that this one will end-up being a big hit for Robbins given the range of radio-friendly and DJ-friendly mixes.
• Toby Emerson’s Rapture is a new release from System, and the response has been very favorable. The two club-length remixes are both really hot; one is more general, and the other very much trancey, but I like the production work, and the vocals, on both. System pumps out a lot of music, and I’ve not really embraced all that much of it personally, but this one’s a winner in my book.

Turn it up…

Wes