Unless you’ve been caving over the weekend or your music tastes start and end with medieval madrigals, you would have heard about the intemperate comments made by  KISS bassist Gene Simmons who told depression sufferers: ‘F*** You! Kill Yourself’ 

While that news went swiftly around the globe via social media, so did the reaction from Triple M Content supremo Mike Fitzgerald who promptly banned all KISS songs from his network, saying, “Depression and Suicide are not topics he should be using to further his notoriety or sell records. The Triple M Network can’t and won’t be playing or supporting this dickhead’s music.”

To see if Mike’s been as good as his word we checked the number of KISS songs played on Triple M all last week including over the weekend. A report generated by our friends at AirCheck showed that Triple M did not play one solitary KISS song over the weekend. But perhaps in a “pre-emptive strike”, apart from Triple M Adelaide, none of the others had played any KISS music throughout the preceding week. 

Figure 1 below shows the Kiss spins by station last week and Fig 2, below it, shows the much fewer number of stations that played KISS songs.

In his statement on Friday, Fitzpatrick also challenged other stations across Australia and North America to drop, “any of this nudnik’s songs until such time as he reconsiders his thoughtless and insensitive position.”

Apart from a few holdouts, it seems most had followed Fitzy’s lead. As you’ll see in the charts below, in the nine major markets monitored by AirCheck, there was plenty of KISS played last week (Fig 1), but spins had slowed to a trickle by the weekend (Fig 2). 

During last week 28 stations in Australia’s 9 major markets played KISS songs 61 times. By the weekend that had dropped, with only 6 stations playing KISS songs, 8 times.

Fig 1. All plays KISS plays, top 9 markets 11/08/2014 – 17/08/2014

Fig 2 All plays KISS plays, top 9 markets, Weekend of 16/08/2014 – 17/08/2014