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Which is best - Q-Music or Studio Brussel?

posted: March 2, 2009

At work, I share an office with a colleague who loves to listen to the radio while he's working. Fortunately, I've always found it much easier to concentrate while listening to music so this suits me just fine.

Studio Brussel Logo Unfortunately, our musical tastes differ somewhat - while he prefers listening to Q-Music, I prefer to listen to Studio Brussel, which has lead us to decide on a compromise of programs on both radio channels. As a result, there are two stereo sets in the office, which makes it easier to switch between stations (and which enables my ancient stereo to continue shining throughout its retirement).

Even though this compromise suits us both rather well (and has led to some humorous discussion amongst ourselves and several colleagues), his favoured radio station still manages to annoy me from time to time.

Whereas Studio Brussel tends to play a varied selection of alternative and rock music, Q-Music tends to stick to the commercial genre. But it isn't the music which annoys me so much - it's the station itself, and the way they present themselves and their music.

After listening to Q for a while (which, in my honest opinion, is NOT good for you by the way), one tends to get the impression that they recycle their current hit singles... a LOT, up to a point where you become fed up with a song you once (say a week ago) deemed to be a very good song.

Having said that, it's easy to throw the first stone and claim that Studio Brussel is the better station (it is), but is there any scientific proof for this? I decided to find out...

The past weekend, I wrote a little program that continually scans the live feeds of both websites, and stores the playlist in a local .csv file. I will run this program for exactly one week, in order to be able to get some statistics on both stations. This way we can finally answer the following questions and put this issue to rest:

Q-Music Logo
  • which radio station recycles their music the most within one day?
  • which radio station recycles their music the most within one week?
  • exactly how different are these radio stations?

Unfortunately, I can't measure how good or bad the presenters are at their jobs, nor did I find an algorhythm to calculate how many times a station advertises it's own name... probably for the best as well!

The very first test has ended rather abruptly, by the way: I had started my little tool yesterday before midnight, only to find out this evening after work that my old PC running said program had crashed. I have no idea why, but let's just assume that it's because of Q-Music, shall we?

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