Six Degrees of 33s

The Calendar5 articles

Days, seasons, and release timing.

• Bing Crosby Is Still Winning Christmas

  24,060 Christmas-titled records, ranked by artist — Crosby's 135, Bach's accidental 129, Marillion's inexplicable 27, and the band that is 29% Christmas by volume.

• The Busiest Day in Recording History (Did Not Occur)

  21.5 million recordings carry an exact date. The champion day is December 4, 2020, with 18,499 — and every one of the 25 busiest days in recording history is a Friday of the streaming era. Nobody was in the studio. The date field records commerce, not microphones.

• The Day Music Comes Out

  Sixty years of release dates show three different industries — the loose Friday world of vinyl, the UK-Monday/US-Tuesday split of the CD era, and the great global flip of July 2015.

• The Long Goodbye

  The epic closing track feels as old as the LP. The ledger says otherwise — in the vinyl decades the last song was a coin flip, and the closer only became the album's designated long one in the CD and streaming eras, exactly as the opener was shrinking to fit the skip button.

• The Mall Is Still Open

  Vaporwave has been declared dead annually since 2013. The release curves say its biggest year was 2020 — and its successor microgenres, barber beats and slushwave, are peaking right now.