Rediscovering Old Music: C89.5 in 2010 and 2011

I used to listen to C89.5 quite a bit in 2010 and 2011. I even attended C89.5’s Listener Appreciation Party 5 back on August 14, 2010. I discovered a ton of music, to the point where it was difficult keeping track of all it. I remember trying to memorize names of songs that came on while I was driving so I could note them later, only to have trouble recalling it afterward. I found it easier to keep track of the time the song had played and then resort to the playlist on C89.5’s website. However, C89.5 only kept the past 5 or so songs that played. Eventually the entire current day was kept once they redid their website, however that wasn’t until near the end of 2011.¹ That meant there was a short amount of time I could look it up before it was too late.

I managed to find a site that was scraping the playlist on C89.5’s website and it kept a history. However, if I recall correctly, the site had problems collecting data at times and going back through pages sometimes didn’t work. I decided to create my own scraper and host publicly history of what C89.5 played. I collected data from the first track being on 2010-07-28 18:55:33 to the last track being on 2011-12-06 10:13:29. These timestamps are in Pacific Time.

I would have kept this scraper running, but on December 6, 2011, around when they redid their website, I found out my scraper was no longer collecting data because it appeared that C89.5 had blocked the server my scraper was on from accessing their website. After contacting them, it unfortunately was the case that they wanted me to cease scraping their site. Respecting their wishes, I dismantled the scraper and eventually I forgot about it. While they do now have a calendar at the bottom of their playlist page to go through historic data, they did not have this when this scraper existed.

Recently, I have been wanting to rediscover the music that I listened in the past. It finally hit me that I still have this data and I could aggregate it in a way where I can find the total amount of plays in this date range. Chances are I’ve heard the song if it was played often enough, and I could find songs that I missed in the past that weren’t played so frequently. It was all in a MySQL table so I was able to easily aggregate it all in such a manner.

I have exported the data as I feel this may be useful to others that may be trying to rediscover music during this time period. I hope you enjoy rediscovering all this music as much as I did. :)

The Data

I have compiled the total plays in a Google Sheet.
It also contains the raw data, which is just the SQL table with formatted timestamps.

The CSVs and SQL dumps are available in this folder on Google Drive.