Ventura Highway — America
I’ve got a rule that if I hear the same song on the radio three times in reasonably quick succession, that’s a sign I should be writing about it.
I don’t mean on the Top 40 radio stations the kids listen to. After all, they only play about 6 songs an hour and in the next hour they play the same six songs again, just in a slightly different order.
If I applied my rule to Top 40 radio, I could easily clock up three listens to the same song between breakfast and lunchtime.
On slightly older person’s radio…the sort I listen to most of the time…the odds are markedly different. Just in the UK, there have been almost 1400 different Number One singles. So if you add in the number of records that have occupied all the other chart positions over the years…and quite a few songs which are extremely popular, but were never been big chart hits…then you’re probably working with well into six figures of potential programming choices for radio stations.
That makes the odds of hearing the same song often enough to trigger my “rule of three” pretty low.
Even then, I’m cheating a little.
Sadly, because I rather like the song, I haven’t heard “Ventura Highway” by America three times in recent weeks. But I have heard Janet Jackson’s “Someone To Call My Lover” from the early 2000s three times on…
