Last year I reviewed the most popular songs of the year on Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live radio show. It was an imprecise attempt to gauge the popularity of artists and songs on a national level. Given that the show has nearly 17,000 fans on its Facebook page, its listenership is not small.
Almost every weekend, the channel broadcasts its "13 Under 13" show, a Casey Kasem for the kiddos which counts down the week's top songs. As noted last year, the list is not totally objective -- there is a subjective nature to the list which takes into the station's directors' sense of buzz, for example, associated with each song. There's a practical limit to the number of times the station can play a song in a week without annoying its audience through oversaturation, a limit which may not totally reflect the demand for it via listener requests.
Having said that, there does appear to be a rational relationship between the rankings and actual airplay. For example, the most recent "13 Under 13" had the Board of Education's "Why Is Dad So Mad?" at #1, Keller Williams' "Mama Tooted" at #7, and Caspar Babypants' "Sugar Ant" at #14. The total number of airplays (excluding double-counts) for the week that roughly corresponds to KPL's week, according to Dogstar Radio, was 25, 16, and 13, respectively.
