After iHeartRadio sent out a tweet promoting Kelly Clarkson as a performer at this weekend’s iHeartRadio Music Festival, Clarkson went on the offense taking aim at the company for the lack of airplay the company gave her most recent album.
The shots appeared to be taken after the failure of “Meaning of Life” to produce any single with noticeable airplay. The lead single “Love So Soft” peaked on the Billboard charts at #21 with 12 weeks on the chart. Is that iHeart’s fault or the lack of the record label to promote the album knowing it didn’t have a song that would succeed at radio?
Clarkson is one of those artists that has transcended the need for radio airplay. The album was on many critic’s best of 2017 lists. Her judging role on The Voice gave her more exposure than she would’ve gotten through radio. And that will only grow when she launches a daily television talk show in September 2019. Clarkson still retains plenty of airplay at Hot AC and AC from her other tracks, including many iHeartMedia owned stations. Exposure will not be a problem for her, but promoting a new album still requires demand from programmers and now in the streaming age listeners. But at least Clarkson understands and respects the need for radio airplay in an age when most artists do not.
First time hearing Love So Soft on the radio!! Thank you 102.7 WNEW ???????? pic.twitter.com/Qe9P4IrmcC
— Kelly Clarkson ????????☀️ (@kellyclarkson) September 8, 2017
Nathan Obral 
Todd Mitchell 
wolfenforcer32
It’s a chicken and the egg situation: are the record companies going to want to promote a record when there’s little to no chance a monolith of stations that share the same music logs and syndicate the same talent on all their stations decline any interest?
If iHeart hadn’t centralized everything and crammed down Elvis Duran and Ryan Seacrest in every possible market, then there might have been a chance Kelly would have had some regional success that eventually translated elsewhere. But that’s all but impossible now. To be brutally honest, Bruce Springsteen, Rush and David Bowie would have never been given a chance under this “Premium Choice” setup.
All this is doing is further exacerbating the permanent loss of younger demos from terrestrial radio altogether, which is totally damning for the already bleak future of CHR.
We program our Top 40…even during the Elvis Duran show.
Has she ever thought that maybe some people just don’t want to hear her music as much any more, much less buy a copy of it?