How SpinCounts Works

Where the data comes from

SpinCounts monitors the live "now playing" and play-history feeds that radio stations broadcast alongside their streams, around the clock. The network — currently 3,800+ active stations, with a U.S. focus — spans three kinds of radio:

• Terrestrial FM streaming online, including iHeartRadio market stations;
• SiriusXM satellite channels; and
• Internet broadcasters streaming across the major online radio platforms and directories.

Each play is captured with the station, the exact air time reported by the station's feed, and the station's location. The full roster is public — browse the station directory to see every station and its logged play history. Stations join the network continuously; broadcasters can claim or submit a station free.

How plays get matched to songs

A raw feed entry ("ARTIST - Title") becomes a verified spin through matching: titles and artist names are normalized and matched against our catalog, then enriched with release metadata from major music catalogs — including the recording's ISRC (International Standard Recording Code), album, label, genre and artwork. ISRC anchoring ties airplay to the specific recording rather than a loose text match, which matters when different songs share a title.

Matching is never perfect at radio scale, so it's backed by ongoing curation: station-break and advertising strings are filtered out before they count, junk data is purged when a station's feed misbehaves, duplicate artist and track records get merged, and mismatches reported to us are fixed by hand. Pages without any recorded airplay are excluded from search-engine indexing until they earn data.

How fresh the numbers are

Spins: most plays appear within minutes of airing; a few partner networks deliver play history on a delay, so some spins post up to a few hours after broadcast. Every spin keeps its original air timestamp regardless of when it posts.

Totals: a track's lifetime count combines its permanent play ledger with the most recent weeks of live spins — what you see on a page is the full recorded history, not a rolling window.

Charts: airplay charts rank songs purely by verified spins in each chart's window. The chart week runs Saturday to Saturday, publishes Sundays at 6 PM ET, and movement arrows compare against the previous week's frozen snapshot. Chart positions cannot be bought: there are no submissions, votes, or pay-for-placement. (Paid Airplay Campaigns promote a track to stations and on-site placements, clearly labeled — they never alter chart math, which counts real spins only.)

What we don't claim

• No service monitors every station on earth — including this one. Treat any spin count, here or anywhere, as "at least this many within the monitored network." Coverage is strongest for U.S. FM streams, SiriusXM and internet radio.
• SpinCounts is not a royalty census. Performance royalties are paid by PROs (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) and SoundExchange from their own licensed data. Our logs are an independent record you can cross-reference — see airplay reports — not a payment system.
• We are independent. SpinCounts is not affiliated with Billboard, Mediabase, Nielsen, or any PRO. Comparisons we publish about other services are date-stamped and drawn from those services' own public materials.

Corrections

If a spin, match, or artist attribution looks wrong — a play credited to the wrong recording, a junk title that slipped through, a duplicate profile — tell us. Reported issues are investigated against the raw feed logs; confirmed errors are corrected by fixing the match, merging duplicates, or purging bad data, and the fix propagates to every page, chart and report built from it. Artists can also flag issues directly from their claimed artist page.

Want the product view of all this — search, maps, charts and reports in one place? See how the SpinCounts radio airplay tracker works, or start with the artist directory.