“When Top 40 Played It All”: Should Those Days Come Back?

It is the thing that listeners most wax nostalgic for when they consider the Top 40 radio of their childhood. Someone mentions it almost every Saturday afternoon in the Twitter thread on that week’s American Top 40 rerun. So did the listeners to my Thursday afternoon “Lost Factor” discussions with Dan Reed on WXPN Philadelphia. So do many of the other music writers I talk to. They all miss the days “when Top 40 radio played it all” — a time that seems long gone. 

Recently, Billboard’s Elias Leight asked if the “play it all” ethos was long gone from Top 40. The answer is that it’s not there at this moment, particularly because there’s been almost no pop/rock making its way from Alternative or Active Rock to Top 40 recently. What people remember about times of “play it all” is often having Country and Hip-Hop crossovers ta the same time. At this moment, CHR can segue from Miguel to Morgan Wallen or from Luke Combs to Lil Durk (and even, on a few stations, to the Lil Durk & Wallen collaboration). But Taylor Swift is having to fill in a lot of the space between them. (And at one point, Taylor to Toosii would have qualified, too.)

As a lifetime listener, I’m usually happier when CHR is playing it all. I’m hoping that Fall Out Boy’s version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is the record that Top 40 needs to play a rock act again. For a number of successful CHRs, that happened already with “Love From the Other Side.” I’d like to see it happening now with Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “Stuck.” For all of Alternative radio’s own product issues, there’s usually one potential hit over there at any time, and if those songs crossed over to Top 40, it would make both formats stronger.

But I also came to a realization in my discussion with Leight. By itself, “playing it all” does not necessarily correlate with an upturn at Top 40. 

Top 40 variety was pretty much the rule through the early ’80s, but it didn’t do much to break the format’s fall or slow Rock radio’s ascent. Fall ’77 was a particularly broad moment, especially on my hometown station of WPGC Washington, D.C., where R&B crossovers happened first. In early October, WPGC was playing Donna Summer, Fleetwood Mac, Shaun Cassidy, Foghat, Ronnie Milsap, the Commodores, and Foreigner. But at that moment of “You Light Up My Life” at No. 1, my junior-year classmates were solidly behind AOR WWDC (DC101).

When Top 40 began its ascent in 1982-83, R&B was finally back on CHR, but Country crossovers were very much still present, a function of an early-’80s dominance that hadn’t yet burned off entirely. In fall ’83, by general consensus a great moment for CHR, you could hear “Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton, “Cum On Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot, and “Delirious” by Prince. But by 1984, Country crossovers were gone; their absence barely noticed in another great year for CHR. Deciding which of those two years is greatest is always a fun exercise among music-history people; where you land may track with how much you miss the “play it all” era.

1997-98, another consensus golden age of Top 40, was definitely a “play it all” moment. Top 40’s resurgence had been built by readding one genre at a time — Modern AC (although that term didn’t yet exist when Melissa Etheridge and Sheryl Crow had their first hits); Alternative; Dance; Teen Pop; a resurgence of R&B and Hip-Hop (after even more years off the radio than the early-’80s “disco backlash”); finally, the return of Country crossover (although the first, LeAnn Rimes’ “How Do I Live,” was sort of a cheat — a Country artist covering a Country hit, but not the version that Country played).

Top 40’s next comeback in 2007-10 was something different. In the early ’00s, rhythmic pop had become the dominant sound at Mainstream CHR, and much of it was homegrown, not R&B crossover, and that pattern took hold again. During the turbo-pop era, you could hear Lady Gaga and the artist now known as Lady A, but much of Top 40’s music was developed in-house: An Usher or Rihanna hit wouldn’t be the single worked at R&B radio; pop/punk acts (Cobra Starship, Boys Like Girls) weren’t spending a lot of time (or any) at Alternative radio. In 2010, the biggest pop/rock record on Mediabase’s year-end CHR chart was Orianthi’s “According to You.”

For its first few years, turbo-pop was generally agreeable to everybody, and CHR became an exporter of hits, rather than an importer. CHR being self-contained only became a problem a few years in when we got to turbo-pop’s second string, then segued to harder EDM, and finally to downtempo electronica with neither variety nor energy. More crossovers from other formats might have helped, but Top 40 had gotten out of practice in finding them. Plus, neither Hip-Hop nor Alternative radio ever really recovered from the early PPM-measurement-era dominance of Top 40.

Wide variety by itself isn’t enough, and when Top 40 PDs try to cobble it together from various extremes, as they did in the early ’90s before giving up, it seems particularly incoherent without center-lane songs. That also feels like the case now. (Perhaps Today’s Top Hits on Spotify — with Billie Eilish, Gunna, and Wallen — is precisely that, but it reminds me of the confusion of the early days of monitored airplay and computerized sales info.) The true best moments for CHR have always been a combination of its own strong homegrown records and the best of everything. At this moment, with only four bulleted songs in the CHR top 10, Top 40 is hobbled by the lack of both depth and variety.

Through CHR’s product shortage, with labels not even wanting to work follow-ups to No. 1 hit songs, I’ve been waiting for other formats, particularly Hip-Hop/R&B and Alternative radio, to fill the void. I’ve also been waiting for some label — indie or major — to profit by showing the attention to radio that others are not. So far, only Country, with a larger body of healthier stations and a chart process informed by, but not solely dominated by, streaming, has artists who can create their own streaming stories without being worked.

I’m writing this story five days after the announced shutdown of AllAccess.com. I’m sorry for the friends and industry veterans affected. I’m bummed about losing another major piece of radio’s infrastructure. I particularly worry about losing a visible part of the promotion process. With one less trade publication, is there even less label impetus for labels to work songs to CHR radio? Or for those stories to be told?

The hardest part about each major loss in the industry — whether AllAccess or a prominent radio station — is that each door closing has not been accompanied by a new one opening. Those doors are hard for broadcasters to find when they feel defeated, or not in control of their own destiny. Fixing CHR — starting with restoring the “best of everything” balance but also aggressively finding more music — is one of the easiest places for radio to take charge of the landscape again.