Geoff Duncan

An ad for a local radio station promises soft hits you can play while your kids are in the car without worrying about something "offensive" being heard, and that, you know, sometimes you just need to hear a particular song, turn on the station, and like magic that song is playing on this station! Wow! The ad is so saccharine and cloying and annoying that I hit MUTE or change the channel when it appears, and I have no idea what station it promotes. Or I'd name them here unkindly. Really. But the ad reminded me of something: urban/suburban American kids of certain age probably had the experience of turning on the radio and finding it was playing the exact song they were thinking about. Maybe you were humming or whistling a song, turned on the radio, and the song was playing at the exact same point. Come on, admit it! It happened to you, or at least to someone you know, in a moment of magical jaw-dropping serendipity. Wild theories ensued: maybe there was some truth about dental work picking up radio broadcasts—after all, that happened once on Gilligan's Island! Maybe some people are natural radio receivers and subconsciously tuned in to the broadcast. It can't be a coincidence: I mean, what are the odds?

Back-of-the-envelope time! OK, the first thing to notice is that this only happens to folks who listen to CHR (Contemporary Hits Radio) or other heavily formatted stations. In my experience, this cosmic congruence never occurs with people who listen to independent radio, college stations, public radio, or similar—serendipity for those folks is the station playing an artist they've seen live, or a track off an album they own. Second, the oh-my-God sychronicity almost always happens to kids, who are also the most likely to listen to heavily-formatted, small-rotation radio.

OK. So CHR stations typically have a rotation of 25-30 songs (broader commercial stations may have rotation lists as large as 70-90 tracks). Let's assume an average track length of three and a half minutes, and (generously) that approximately 60 percent of airtime is actually music. Assuming a 24 hour broadcast schedule, that means each song in rotation is going to play roughly eight and ten times a day. (Stations with larger rotations may only play tracks two to three times a day).

On a CHR station, these guesstimates mean a particular track occupies something like three to four percent of their music airtime, or about two percent of their total airtime. So, if you're thinking of a particular song in a CHR station's rotation, that means the odds are about 1 in 50 that you can turn on that station and the song will be playing. For the moment of serendipity, folks probably need to turn on the radio within about a five second window of "synching up" with the particular song. That drops the odds of a cosmic radio moment to about 0.07 percent: less than 1 in 1000.

That feels about right. As a kid, say I had friends who listened to the radio semi-regularly (say, turning the radio on five times a week) between the ages of 11 and 15. That's turning on the radio over 1000 times apiece... which neatly explains why everyone seems to have had one of those radio-synchronous moments.

Also? Can't get Señor Coconut & his Orchestra's version of Smooth Operator out of my head this morning.