How the Top 10 is counted
Behind the countdown the station has run for decades.
The countdown sounds simple from outside. Ten songs, in order, once a week. This follows how the order gets decided, from the first request of the week to the moment the list is locked.
You see the request log, which is larger and stranger than most listeners imagine, and the play log that records every track the station puts out with the time it went. You see the two weighed against each other, and the discussion about the songs sitting on the boundary, which is where the argument always is.
The method has been broadly the same for decades, and the film is honest about the parts of it that are judgement rather than arithmetic. A chart assembled by a formula alone would be a worse chart, and nobody involved pretends otherwise.
It ends where the countdown does: a list, printed out, carried into the studio and read. The paper is still paper. Nobody has been able to explain why, and nobody wants to change it.
