Mai Drake experiment
Update (3/4/2017): I was planning to do this everyday but I knew from an early stage that my experiment had failed miserably so I cut my losses at the end of the month of March and say good game Mai FM, good game. Read on about how the experiment.
I once tweeted saying if you put the radio on Mai FM, you’d hear a song that features Drake within 3 songs of switching it onto that channel. I initially thought I was making a joke however it’s closer to the truth if you extend it to within 4 songs.
A bit of background to this. My previous car had all the FM stations available to me however my replacement car is one of those 90s cars that has a Japanese radio which only goes from the frequencies of 70-90 FM. Therefore I can only tune into 2 stations in Auckland, Mai FM on 88.6 FM and Newstalk ZB on 89.4 FM. I could have got an FM expander but I was thinking this car would only be a temporary one. Due to my laziness I kept the car without searching for another and also got used to this double station setup.
Since I decided since I’ve heard Drake quite a bit, I’d document the times I’m in my car for a 15 minute journey and see when I put it on Mai if a Drake song would come up.
Other channels do often play on repeat a certain artist especially if their song is flavour of the month but I have have no doubt that none has the regularity that Mai has with Drake. To their credit it’s a variety of Drake songs they play.
How it works is if I hear four songs and Drake appears not once, my hypothesis is incorrect. If I do hear him within 4 songs my hypothesis is correct and then I can feel free to switch to Newstalk ZB or continue to listen to the soothing hip-hop, R&B and urban beats that present themselves on Mai.
Listening out for Drake
Listening to Mai during March 2017 (final update 31/3)
Results
Number of journeys: 21
Hypothesis correct: 5 out of 21 journeys – 24%
Hypothesis incorrect: 8 out of 21 journeys – 38%
Test inconclusive: 8 out of 21 journeys – 38%
So therefore my hypothesis was clearly wrong, Mai does not play Drake as much I thought they did. However if I had gone with the number of times they played a song with a featured artist, how many of the songs with the English ginga Ed Sheeran or So Good with Zara Larsson of all people, I would have been more successful. I personally prefer Zara Larsson’s song Lush Life which is about the life of New Zealand broadcaster Marcus Lush.