Does Radio Need More Artists to Overplay?

Is Country radio somehow not playing Morgan Wallen enough?

Is the problem with other current-based formats that they don’t have their own Morgan?

Does radio need more artists to overplay? Does having a Morgan, Sabrina Carpenter, or Kendrick Lamar song every 20 minutes, depending on your format, convey the excitement of a hot artist, or merely expose the lack of other hot artists?

Shortly before Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem album was released, KBAY (Bay Country) San Jose had three songs in power rotation. This week, it has five. And as that album enters its fifth week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, KBAY’s group PD Phil Becker believes that Country radio hasn’t done enough to capitalize on the event value of the new album.

When Ross on Radio looked at how power rotation differed at various key stations earlier this month, six stations, nearly half of those we cited, had more than one Wallen song in their heaviest rotation. KBAY had “I’m the Problem,” “I Ain’t Comin’ Back,” and “Just in Case” in power. Now those three songs have been joined at KBAY by Wallen’s new Country chart single, “I Got Better,” and new pop-chart single, “What I Want” with Tate McRae. 

In a Linked In posting, Alpha’s Becker contends that “Country radio has underplayed the significance of this release.” He goes on to say that Country hasn’t sufficiently acknowledged Zach Bryan, Brandon Lake, Tyler Childers, and others who are “over-indexing in digital engagement.” KBAY has often been more aggressive on those artists since its launch, as evidenced by also having Lake in power when the last article was written.

To put this in perspective, you have to acknowledge how many of its norms the Country radio and chart community has already allowed Wallen to shatter. The “don’t work two singles at once” credo fell five years ago. To listen to Country radio now is to hear Wallen at least twice in a typical hour, and sometimes more. For Wallen and Jelly Roll at least, artist separation has changed almost as radically as it did at CHR. Wallen already had multiple No. 1 singles from I’m the Problem before it was even released.

But it’s true that Mediabase’s Country airplay chart doesn’t look like Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, where Wallen has the top three songs and six of the top 10. At radio, the top Wallen songs are “Just in Case” (6-4 at this writing), “I Ain’t Coming Back” (No. 46, having peaked at No. 43), the just-impacted single “I Got Better” (No. 62), and “What I Want” (No. 74). The recent No. 1 song “I’m the Problem” is the top recurrent. The first preview single from the album, “Love Somebody,” is No. 6. There are two more in the top 10.

To some extent, whether you regard that as lots of Wallen or not nearly enough depends on to what extent you think radio should move at the speed of streaming. That’s an issue in every format. Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” and Sombr’s “Undressed” are building quickly at Top 40 by the standards of radio records, but I continue to see articles about how radio is lagging on those songs. 

In his weekly Hit Momentum Report, researcher Matt Bailey is one of the voices who thinks that radio should be moving those hits through the system faster as well. Given the softness at the top of the charts, it is sometimes surprising that those songs still need to climb the charts symmetrically. I would power “Undressed” and “Love Me More” now; other PDs will likely get there, but not for a few weeks. I would also be playing Sombr’s “Back to Friends” more than most CHRs are spinning it. But I write all this with the knowledge that some PDs will agree, while others are thinking, “Ooh, I’d like to compete with your station.” 

A lot of what Bailey also does is to try to help PDs differentiate between streaming phenomena and radio hits, especially those acts that rule the charts in their first week. One of his ongoing examples has been Taylor Swift, one of the few other artists at the Wallen-esque level of streamer loyalty. The Tortured Poets Department wasn’t the same boon for radio as DSPs, although that might have been different if radio had played “Fortnight” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” simultaneously rather than sequentially.

There is something exciting about when radio first decides to overindulge an artist, particularly when it reflects a breakthrough moment for an act. Prince’s 1999 and Michael Jackson’s Thriller were both events for Detroit radio. On the R&B stations there, the hits from 1999 weren’t just the ones that you heard on pop radio. They were also “Free,” “Lady Cab Driver,” and “DMSR,” not to mention a few non-LP B-sides of singles.

There is also something frustrating these days when radio overindulges an artist and gives you the sense that it doesn’t have enough else to play. I believe that why Country succeeds now is its mix of streaming- and callout-driven hits, as well as post-Wallen streaming successes and longer-running heritage acts. When we looked at Country’s powers, Wallen was omnipresent, but so was Locash’s by-then-recurrent “Hometown Home,” a record driven much more by callout. 

By contrast, Top 40’s moment of “three Post Malone songs at once” in the late ’10s was a lot to sit through if you weren’t a superfan, but it also brought home just how weak the rest of CHR music was at the time. To hear Hip-Hop radio now is often to hear Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and their duets in an hour’s time. They are not building to the same sort of overexposure that allowed Lamar to eviscerate Drake, but they are doing a lot of the format’s lifting.

Part of the excitement of Top 40 last summer was having several artists at once with multiple hits: Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan. Top 40 did the right thing by making a first-day event of Benson Boone’s American Heart, although only SiriusXM Hits 1 and KIIS Los Angeles seem to have sustained that through the week. Carpenter’s upcoming Man’s Best Friend is also a potential event for pop radio, and stations should be thinking about the right way to capitalize on it with the Wallen discussion in mind.

One of the things the Wallen discussion brings home is how his dominance of the Billboard 200 comes because of the relative softness of the album chart. If it’s frustrating to have current pop hits that aren’t better than “Too Sweet,” “Beautiful Things,” “Die With a Smile,” or other lingering titles, it’s equally frustrating to look at the album chart and realize that there are only 27 albums more interesting to listeners than Fleetwood Mac’s 48-year-old Rumours.

In other words, there aren’t a lot of Wallens now because the industry isn’t putting much into creating album artists or keeping a project going if it doesn’t explode right away. For years, it sometimes happened that the third single from a project was the one that sold the album. Now, there’s less likelihood that an act will get to a third single (or even, necessarily, an album in a timely manner), and less interest in actually selling that album. 

In his advice to clients about the Wallen release, A&O&B’s Kenny Jay’s checklist for taking advantage of a major album release included making station promos out of artist teasers, bringing fans to the station for a first listen, frequent premiere airplay of multiple tracks with custom stagers for all titles, soliciting listener feedback and interacting with the comments, and having jocks endorse favorite tracks. Those ideas would work with Carpenter as well.

There’s also the question of how long to seize on a hot artist’s release and capitalize long-term. A month later, there’s still a lot of Wallen music on KBAY. I tuned in just before 2 p.m. on June 25 and there were four songs over the space of 50 minutes. But between the songs, the emphasis is now on other station business (Disney trips, Dierks Bentley tickets, a San Jose Sharks draft event). Country radio could have talked about Morganmania non-stop since the release of his One Thing at a Time album two years ago. Finding the balance is an issue for all stations and formats.