If you’ve read my website’s page dedicated to Popmaster, you’ll know that me and a few others like to play the ‘3 in 10 Game’ which simply has us guessing the 3 in 10 artist each day. We’ve had some luck and managed to guess a few times throughout the year, and we even pass around a trophy I made for a bit of fun. Recently, we’ve had a problem. Artists are getting repeated from previous months.
Because of the game, we ended up making a list of every 3 in 10 artist for the year, but around November 2024, we started to notice a huge amount of artists being repeated that had come up in January 2024. This continued into December, and hasn’t stopped into the new year, where in January we started to see repeats from February 2024. It’s gotten to the point now that almost every single artist being chosen has already come up in the first two months of 2024. All in all, it’s dampened our fun a little bit as it takes the guesswork away, and it’s also running the risk of people potentially being able to anticipate the artists that are due to come up on Popmaster, giving contestants a potentially unfair advantage.
I highlighted this point to the Popmaster Facebook Group, who found it interesting, and I’ve also sent this onto the official Popmaster email so they could hopefully do something about it.
To further prove my point, I’ve looked back on previous year’s and counted the number of repeats in those years. In 2020, there were 6 repeats in the year, and in 2021 there were 8 repeats (A huge thanks to https://thecompartments.uk/ for documenting these!). Between the 1st January 2024 to 16th January 2025, there has been a whopping 23 repeats, 16 of these being from the 6th November to the 9th January, which is crazy compared to previous years. Bucks Fizz are on track to come up for a fourth time in just one year.
Below are the artists throughout November and December 2024. Those that have been repeated are highlighted in red and the previous dates they came up with have been noted on the sheet. I hope this can be rectified, which will hopefully breathe some fresh air back into 3 in 10, which is a lot of people’s favourite part of their weekday mornings. I’ll continue to document the 3 in 10 artists as we go through the year.
17.01.2025
On January 17th 2025, we finally had our first artist since the 9th December that wasn’t a repeat. Who was the artist? Tears For Fears. I bring this up because coincidently, this is one of the artists I jokingly mentioned in my first email to the Popmaster team back in November:
If Howard Jones comes up in the next week, I’m calling it that I’ve sucessfully brought attention to this issue!
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