Every radio DJ has a personal canon — the songs they know will hold a room, fill a floor, or carry a late-night set. The difference between curators who refine that canon over decades and those who rely on the same rotation for years is whether they've externalized their criteria or kept them tacit.
A Scoring System, Not a Playlist
The template's architecture is a weighted ranking system built from five independent assessments. Major Ranking (rated out of 10) sets the overall tier. Four secondary dimensions — Catching Intro, Nice Music, Meaningful Lyrics, and Memorable — are each rated out of 7. Differentiator is an integer that accommodates whatever doesn't fit the standard criteria: cultural moment, production innovation, crossover appeal.
The calculation chain is explicit: each secondary rating converts through a Stars Converter field, then the Minor Ranking aggregates them — each multiplied by 120. Total Points combines Major Ranking (weighted at 1200x), Minor Ranking, and Differentiator. A song that scores 9 on Major Ranking, 6 on each secondary criterion, and a Differentiator of 50 produces a deterministic, comparable number. The subjectivity is in the inputs; the comparison is objective.
The Classification Layer
Category (multichoice: Country, Jazz, Hip Hop, Soft Pop, Heavy Metal, Pop, Disco, R&B Ballad, Rock & Roll, Ballad, Christmas, Slow Rock, Hot Rock, R&B, Raggie) and Artist Category (Solo Female/Male, Duo, Group in various gender configurations) make the database filterable by genre and formation.
Year Deput — the year of release or debut — anchors each entry historically. Filtering by decade alongside Category reveals genre evolution patterns that listening alone doesn't surface. The template was designed to eventually hold 10,000 entries; the classification structure supports that scale.
Operational Fields for Active DJs
YouTube link provides direct access for preview and playback reference. Last Play tracks the most recent time a track appeared in a set — a field that prevents over-rotation of favourites and surfaces neglected tracks that score well but haven't been played in months.
Owned Song (multichoice: CD, MP3, DVD, None, Not Sure) documents format availability. For a working DJ, knowing that a high-scoring track exists only on vinyl or in an uncertain format has direct set-planning implications. The distinction between "None" and "Not Sure" is operationally meaningful: one is a gap, the other is an item for the next crate-digging session.