6Music regret asking

Topping off the somewhat extended 10th birthday celebrations, 6Music asked its listeners to vote for the 100 best tunes released during its lifetime.

That was always going to be a mistake, wasn't it? Apart from anything, 6Music likes to wear the clothes of a station for whom charts and mainstream popularity are of little interest and so this sort of poll feels like one step away from offering the breakfast show to Bruno Brookes.

More importantly, by its very nature, the exercise was doomed to have the more mainstream offerings of the station coagulate at the top of the list. In fact, I believe an identical list of 100 records circulates round advertising agencies whenever they need to come up with a new tune to slap on an ad for Homebase or Vodafone.

And, there, topping it off: Clocks by Coldplay.

If 6Music had planned to run a high-profile advertising campaign that said "you know our reputation for loving new music and seeking out bright new sounds? Fuck that, we're more like a permanent shuffle on your brother-in-law's Zafira stereo", it would be less damaging than this.

I listen to 6Music a lot, and it not being the sort of station where you'd hear Clocks by Coldplay is a major part of the attraction.

In fact, the Last.FM listing of tracks played on the station appears to back this up. Admittedly, Last.FM doesn't track every single track played, and hasn't been gathering data across the whole of 6Music's life, but Clocks doesn't show up in the 500 most popular tracks. (Older songs - DeeLite's Groove Is In The Heart, and the Wu-Tang's Gravel Pit, for example, do make the 500 so age is no disadvantage.) Coldplay do turn up, around the mid 300-teens, with Viva La Vida.

So we're left with the strange situation that the supposed "best" song of the station's lifetime gets played less often than, say, Ladykillers by Lush, or Every Day Should Be A Holiday by The Dandy Warhols.

So what's going on?

A pair of embarrassed Tweets from 6Music last night offers an explanation:

Hi everybody, The Greatest Hits was always likely to provoke an emotional response to the music we all care about.

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) February 1, 2013

Some bands will always have bigger voting power due to their popularity but the range of artists in the list shows our breadth of music

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) February 1, 2013

In other words, the chart was hijacked by a big band with a large fanbase. Whoever saw that coming, eh?