Queen Elizabeth II's passing was announced on Thursday 8 September 2022 at 6:30pm. There were longstanding plans for what should happen to broadcast entertainment around this time. Relevant here is that radio presenters are told to play "inoffensive music" before breaking the news1. I was curious what this meant in practice, and what would happen during the 10 day mourning period2.
I'm using playlist data from UKRadioLive and analysed all major radio stations, plus some independents. This includes stations from the BBC, Globe Media (Absolute, Kiss, Magic), and Bauer Media (Classic FM, Capital, Heart, Radio X). I got the audio features of the songs played from Spotify.
Below are some charts showing how the acousticness and positiveness of music changed. I've shown the times of the announcement and funeral as lines and the mourning period in red. The values in the chart are Spotify's own units for measuring these features 3.
It won't surprise you that the music was immediately much less positive than usual. Dancability, energy, and loudness also decreased (not shown), but to a slightly lower extent. Instead, more acoustic-sounding music was played.
The music on Friday 9th was pretty similar to the 8th, and over the weekend things slowly returned to normal. There's an anomaly on the evening of Sunday 11th where both graphs change sharply. It turns out that I normally have data for 87% of stations around that time, but here I only have data for 21%. I can't find any event that would explain this; nothing really happened in the UK on that day. BBC Radio One was actually playing a future soul mix at the time, so it just looks like a data issue.
By Tuesday 13th, stations were back to their pre-announcement levels of positiveness and acousticness. Well, almost: there remained a small increase in acousticness and decrease in positiveness compared to the average.
The funeral was on Monday 19th, and radios started preparing on the afternoon of the 18th. The trends were similar to the announcement, peaking (or troughing) when the funeral started at 11am. Over the rest of the day music became more normal, with the change becoming more rapid by 6pm when the public aspect of the day was finishing. By Tuesday, the end of the mourning period, music was back to normal and remained so from then on.
So, no surprises anywhere here. It's interesting to see how radio dealt with the immediate aftermath of the announcement, taking four days to return to (not quite) normal.
Presenters are notified of something happening by a dedicated "obit light". ↩
There weren't any restrictions on entertainment output during the mourning period. ↩
Corrected for the usual variation in types of music played at different times of day (i.e. removed daily seasonality using STL). ↩