Programming in the Time of Streaming: ROR Declaration No. 3

There are people on both the radio and music sides of the industry who have been trying to put a positive spin on the state of music and the charts over the last five years. The audience is choosing now, label friends say, no longer at the mercy of A&R people or radio gatekeepers.  If “the people” want “Beautiful Things” for 19 months or 63-year-old Lesley Gore LP cuts for a few weeks, who are we to curate?

Maybe we can agree now that there’s a problem. Current formats struggle, except for Country, the only format that still has a robust product flow. Recently, consultant Alan Burns pointed out that the top 10 was full of songs that were not consensus powers and, in fact, sometimes not being powered by any CHR in the top 50 markets. Researcher Matt Bailey suggested, in a column called “Where the Hell are the Hits?”, that we have one “Ordinary” consensus hit at the moment. “The people,” deputized to be both A&R managers and music directors, are taking the summer off, when we need them most. 

Streaming has created a profit model for labels — driven additionally by devoting fewer resources to radio. It’s harder to say what that model has done for artists. Viral moments allow more artists brief access to a rented unicorn, but rarely to a sustained hitmaking career. It has long been held that no label in this day and age would give R.E.M. four years to break through; now its A&R process would consist mostly of badgering Michael Stipe to post more TikToks. And some of those social-media postings by artists are still photos of their $9.83 royalty checks.

This week, Shaboozey’s “Good News” enters the Country and Hot AC top 10s. It is No. 13 and the third largest gainer of spins at CHR, despite not being a streaming phenomenon on the order of “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” Bailey notes that “Good News” is a case of radio airplay driving streaming, rather than vice-versa. While “Good News” has been a power at some medium-market callout-driven CHRs for weeks, Shaboozey is having the follow-up success denied to Glass Animals or Gayle in part because of its simultaneous development at Country, where streaming is not yet recognized as the only path to success.

I’ve been devoting July to summarizing and updating a few years’ worth of thoughts on the state of radio overall, as well as our ongoing issues with radio station streaming. I revisit those topics a few times a year, perhaps. It feels like I’m writing about the dearth of pop hits (and Country’s relative robustness) every other week — more frequently than when we anoint a new consensus power-rotation song. Doing a broader declaration of principles about the hit music landscape now requires telling you something I haven’t yet said, so let’s start here. 

Letting streaming make all the decisions has not been a viable path for radio. KYGO Denver, one of Country’s most streaming-savvy stations, has been a consistent winner in a market with in-format competition. It is also possible to point to stations heavily influenced by streaming in both CHR and Country that have been less successful, and do not consistently beat their in-format competition. Stations I follow, such as KMVQ (99.7 Now) San Francisco or WDJQ (Q92) Canton, Ohio, use streaming to inform their judgment, not in place of it.

Looking beyond streaming sometimes has been a viable path for radio. At WKRZ Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Shaboozey is in power, along with Benson Boone’s “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.” WKRZ is the market leader in most months, despite a direct competitor. WIXX Green Bay, Wis., another consistently successful and well-researched radio station, is powering Boone, Myles Smith’s “Nice to Meet You,” and Shinedown’s “Three Six Five.”  If WKRZ and WIXX are winning, despite powering songs outside Spotify’s top 200, are they wrong? Would they do even better powering “No One Noticed” by the Marias instead?

Streaming does have implications for radio’s timing. Burns cited four songs that had become top-10 hits without becoming major-market consensus powers. Two were songs without big streaming numbers: Boone’s “Sorry” (which, Bailey notes, is still showing streaming growth) and Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam.” But two, Sombr’s “Undressed” and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild,” are instances of radio lagging behind streaming. Radio was afraid to power “Die with a Smile” across the board until it had already been No. 1. So …

We need to ask what “power” means now, anyway. Bailey has noted Carpenter’s streaming numbers, while huge, are tapering off weekly. My interpretation is not that “Manchild” isn’t a hit, but that it is, perhaps, at its most valuable now. (Or maybe callout will pick up the slack, as it did in some places for Doechii’s “Anxiety” after streams trailed off.) In the absence of enough “hit-by-any-conceivable-metric” songs, I would have no problem powering “Undressed” now, even before callout catches up, and getting my “hit insurance” from Power Recurrent titles, but in their own rotation to keep power relatively fresh. Or rethinking the value of “power” vs. “power new.”

We are missing streaming hits. There are not so many hits right now that we should overlook “Dark Thoughts” or “Mutt” or “Shake It to the Max (Fly)” or other streaming hits that radio has futzed with but not fully embraced. I am personally more inclined to do so for the songs that add tempo and texture. “No One Noticed,” for me, was a song that solved nothing for Top 40 — which has no shortage of “Wildflower”-type songs-that-meander — but until we have more hits, there was probably a slot for that one, too.

We still need radio hits. Doing a better job of utilizing streaming data would get radio more usable records, but not enough, and doesn’t establish radio as anything other than the “me-too” version of streaming, but without the excitement of ongoing renewal. We have not reached a point where radio can cheerfully abdicate finding the hits. And at this moment of diminished industry attention, when radio most needs to flex, I’m not sure why it would.

I’m not sure what radio flex sounds like now, but it needs to happen when somebody is listening. Mariah Carey’s “Type Dangerous” is a song that radio embraced with surprising quickness; its growth has now slowed, but not disappeared, in the absence of streaming. At this writing, Mediabase shows only three reporters playing “Type Dangerous” even once a day in middays. But if a new Mariah Carey song is to find its audience, it will happen at 10 a.m., when adults are available, not 10 p.m., when not even the kids are still listening.

“Type Dangerous” is a good test case of whether there can still be viable radio records: a name artist with a pleasantly surprising “best song in years,” a tempo record that fills an almost-entirely-unmet need for an R&B club banger. I’ve always thought that Carey should release any new song on Dec. 26, when she has the nation’s attention, but it’s nice to have in a summer short on “Espresso”-type fun. I clearly differ with some readers on whether radio should champion this sort of song, but if you agree that it should, we are giving this song, like many others, just enough spins to waste them.

Radio flex does work better when it takes place across formats. “The Bones” by Maren Morris was a good example of a non-obvious record that became a hit at Country, CHR, and Hot AC because of cross-pollination. Once hits like “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” began radiating out from streaming, radio had less to do, but “Good News” is evidence that a multi-format coalition can do what streaming did not, and why Shaboozey has not followed Rema or Nicky Youre back to the land of the lost hitmakers. Programmers are unlikely to confer across ownership to flex on radio’s behalf, but they do have the ability to make a concerted effort within market clusters to break songs for the benefit of both.

The shared experience is part of what radio offers. I wrote again recently about the Saturday afternoon group that gathers on social media for American Top 40 reruns. They are not, with 1-2 exceptions, industry people. But a shared hit-music experience 50 years ago drives the #AT40 gang to share the experience again now. We almost achieved a shared experience for this generation of listeners last summer.

That I come back every few weeks to the lack of  hits might lead some readers to believe that I mistake our lack of an “Espresso” or “I Had Some Help” as the world’s biggest problem. It does happen to be the one within the purview of Ross on Radio. It is also the one most easily solved, but not if we can’t agree it’s worth solving.