Just digging this hole further... for discussion on why there might be a bias towards newer recordings, albeit with poorer singing, on Sirius digital radio, please comment on the original post.
I took the time to sit down and make some graphs for you all on the subject, using the extremely small sample size of four days. I can get the schedule for next week too, but the results would be skewed: they're doing a special week of Levine's favorite broadcasts, so of course all of them would be relatively recent.
With the data available - 4 days, 19 operas (excluding live broadcasts), here is a graph of the broadcasts by decade (click for a larger version):
Total number of repeated broadcasts:10 (approximately 53%)
Occurrences of singers by name isn't interesting in such a small sample, and with so many repeats. It is worth noting however that there is no Hines, Siepi, Bjoerling, Del Monaco...
From a very limited data set, I have to be careful drawing any conclusions - but this does support my anecdotal evidence. What is interesting is the 20 year gap in recordings, and that they seem to avoid the 90's and plug the 80's and the very recent recordings... and of course, the number of repeats. More than half the recordings they play were aired in the previous three days. That means they got 3 full days of airtime out of fewer than 10 recordings!
Once this upcoming 'week of Levine' is over, I'll try again for a larger sample size. Across 19 broadcast time slots, skipping the 40s and 50s isn't such a big deal. If there's a trend across several weeks though, you can expect another crabby post.
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