I was a college radio DJ. I loved (and still do) the medium of radio. I once had dreams that I’d make my living doing it, but it never quite happened. Because I was interested in the process of radio and wanted to learn as much as I could about it, I joined the executive staff of WKCO. The nice thing about a small school without a communications major in the 1990s was that you could just walk in and become an executive at a real radio station. No one was listening anyway.
I quickly realized something. All of our meetings quickly devolved to the same place every week. Did you hear the new album from [band that was an indie darling five years ago and had made the mainstream]? I can’t believe how bad it was. They sold out. But the data don’t lie. I saw the playlist charts. The album that they were all far too hipster for inevitably got the most spins the next week.
Now, (mumble mumble) years later, we see the same thing happening in Major League Baseball. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, who walked in and became an executive on a real baseball team in the 1990s, spent some time stridently proclaiming that The Analytics’ new album was awful and that no one ever actually liked them. Or something like that. And somehow, the Arizona Diamondbacks World Series appearance has been credited to the fact that they played “small ball.”
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