Next week, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the 46th and final Conclave. Events like this are always important opportunities to get together with people who care about the future of our business. I’m especially looking forward to being part of a panel alongside my boss and mentor John Garabedian, TJ Taormina of The TJ Show, and other great radio minds. Connoisseur Media’s Robby Bridges will be leading the conversation. If you can, I urge you to take this opportunity especially if you’ve never been. Registration is only $199.
One thing Top 40 and Hot AC programmers are sure to be discussing is the lack of great new music. This has been perhaps the longest dead spell in history, which actually began in 2018. There isn’t necessarily a shortage of music. There are new songs being released constantly. There is a shortage of new songs that people seem genuinely passionate about.
Just look at the streaming numbers to see what people actually are choosing to listen to. As I write this, The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” released more than 20 years ago, is #8 on Spotify in the US, and has been in the Top 50 for a few years now. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac is #15 most streamed. It’s not some one-day viral blip. Old records are scattered throughout the Spotify Top 200 every single day.
People will call me crazy for saying that Top 40 radio needs an overhaul and some new rules of what actually qualifies as a hit record, aside from just being “new” and thinking people will like it, despite no charts or numbers to back it up. The success of the Hot AC format during its rise in the early ‘90s was to capitalize on Top 40’s weakness by not playing unproven new songs and focusing the playlist only on proven familiar hits.
Spotify’s Top 200 right now is an incongruous mixture of new songs, recurrents, and songs from the last century that are old enough to drink. Yet turn on a lot of Top 40 stations and you would never know it. Many of the new songs showing real consumption aren’t receiving the kind of Top 40 exposure you’d expect. Meanwhile, radio airplay charts remain packed with unproven new songs marching driven mostly by promotional efforts without an active request or streaming story.
When I write about songs that aren’t receiving Liveline requests or in Spotify’s Top 200—such as “Hit The Wall” or “My Body Isn’t Ready”—it’s not to attack certain titles. It’s because there are lots of good songs with great streaming stories that just simply aren’t getting played. This has been a problem forever, but it’s clear now that we have both Spotify and the request data nightly to show exactly what our listeners wants to hear. Constantly, we still hear programmers making excuses for those charts, as if weeks-old call out and “gut instinct” is a safer, more accurate and modern bet than the demonstrated audience preferences of streaming and requests.
A song can have 5,000 spins and be moving up a chart. That proves radio stations are playing it. It doesn’t necessarily prove listeners love or even like it. Airplay monitors are not a measure of song popularity, yet many programmers treat them as if they were.
At the same time, a song being 15-30 years old doesn’t suddenly make the passion around it irrelevant for the format. We see this every night on Liveline because listeners don’t call to request “a power recurrent.” They ask for the song they’re obsessed with right now. Of course, there are rules and things that just don’t fit whether it’s new or not, that’s the case with most songs only requested by one or two people over the span of many months. But when night after night, week after week, young people from all different places are calling for old songs, are you going to tell them “it doesn’t fit our format?” They’re listening to your station that plays Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, and Bruno Mars. They know what Top 40 is. Sometimes what’s relevant to them is Dolly or Michael Jackson. Sometimes it’s a song they heard in a movie, discovered on TikTok or had somebody play for them in the car. To them, that’s a hit. Right now.
This isn’t an argument that Top 40 should become an oldies format. Far from it. Top 40 desperately needs new music. Pop radio needs the next giant hit record that excites, one that everybody knows, everybody raves about, and has an opinion about and wants to hear again. But we can’t turn mid-chart records into signature records through sheer willpower. If we’re in a weak music cycle, we’re in a weak music cycle. When a new hit does start exploding organically, Pop radio should be all over it. Not six weeks later, much less fighting over Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” after nine months.
The most interesting thing about the Spotify chart right now isn’t that old music is popular. It always has been but is now easier to measure and identify. We are no longer living in a monoculture where barriers are being forced upon us. Listeners no longer recognize the walls we’ve built between new and old music.
Some people say that our idea of playing a lot more throwbacks because of their relevance is not what Top 40 is all about and that it “redefines” the format, yet we’re really returning to the classic definition of the format–the most popular songs at a particular time in any genre. These throwbacks are bigger than almost all of the new music and the test of time has proven them to be eternally familiar superhits, the thing stations claim to play the most.
Agree 100%. The airplay charts, to the extent that they include stations that are not testing the currents, is only indicative of how successful a label promo team is at selling. Of course, this was always true of the charts.
A rep will say “stations x, y, an z” are on a single. Great for them. Most of them in the AAA format will play practically anything 1x a week like most of their currents. I’m not in the position to play “radio/promo hits.” I want to play what my psychographic audience is listening to.
You have to be careful not to fall into the trap of over-relying on streaming data.
Spotify and YouTube are not just for the core Top 40 demographic anymore because they are consumed across every age group and demo. As a result, plenty of heavy-streaming tracks are actually far more relevant to Retro or Classic Hits formats.
Back when physical single sales drove the metrics, you rarely saw older singles on record store shelves, forcing catalog fans to buy full albums instead. That’s why classic albums like Dark Side of the Moon or Bob Marley’s Legend sat on the album charts for years, yet Top 40 radio knew those tracks were not meant for their playlists. Billboard even had a recurrency rule to retire fading songs from the main pop charts.
Just as Country, Rock, and Urban radio do not religiously follow streaming charts, neither should CHR. Top 40 lives in the here and now, which is the implicit contract with the listener. While sprinkling in a familiar hit from a few years back can sound great during workday hours, the core focus needs to stay fresh.
Personally, I think a station executing current CHR/Pop exceptionally well right now is Z-107.5 in Wilmington, NC. Beyond the great air talent and original station liners, their music mix stays aggressively current. I also love the sonic signature of stations like 104.3 ZYP Huntsville, 102.7 The Bomb Honolulu, Z100 NYC, and Radio Now 99.7 San Francisco.
For Classic Hits I love listening to Atlantic 252 from the UK. Aside from the online stream, it can be heard in Manchester and Liverpool on DAB Radio. This station is an ode to the legendary Longwave station that was very influential in the 90s.
Also, the revival of Z-93 Dayton is spot on. The music mix is exactly what Top 40 radio sounded like back in the day. Plus, they air Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 retro additions three times (!!!) on the weekend – the 80s, 90s, and 2000s editions.
For older Oldies I was pleasantly surprised to come across a volunteer-based station broadcasing near Indianapolis called WNAP The Buzzard. They broadcast on several frequencies including 88.1, 91.7, 101.5, and 102.9. Lots of reverb processing for the jocks, and plenty of great 60s jingles.
Lastly, there’s stations like 96.5 Jack FM Seattle and Neon 93.1 Las Vegas. Both kind of remind me of a short-lived mid 90s format called Channel X that played a lot of Modern Rock and Hip Hop hits meshed together, which is also what MTV sounded like at the time.
Thanks for all the listening suggestions. Stations I respect like KZZP Phoenix have always strategically revived oldies; it happened a lot in the UK, too, usually thanks to commercials. It would be fine now if it were part of programmer enterprise. In 1984, when CHR was booming, radio did just fine without playing “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by the Temptations, even when “The Big Chill” brought it back to pop culture. A few years later, when CHR was starting to get dull, stations Guy Zapoleon’s KZZP did start seizing on similar moments to bring back “Twist & Shout” or “Stand By Me.” Where Mason and I most differ is on whether radio needs to do any of its own thinking on music. I agree that it was great to see John Garabedian champion Lady Gaga when “Just Dance” needed the boost. If more PDs had done the same for Slaayter, we would have had another badly needed hit this summer.
Aside from all the TikTok-slash-sync-slash-newscycle-powered throwbacks, there are also the late bloomers: Dominic Fike’s “Babydoll” (2018/10/16 release) and Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings” (2024/04/05). Which, in itself, is a continuum of something probably kick-started in 2019, when two of Lizzo’s older songs, “Truth Hurts” and “Good as Hell”, became late-blooming hits seemingly out of nowhere.
I mean, we’ve had these kinds of either throwbacks or late-blooming hits before – The Beatles’ cover of “Twist and Shout” or Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” gaining new life in 1986 through soundtracks; that whole 1988/89 bringback wave, spurned by UB40’s cover of “Red Red Wine” finally becoming a hit in the US five years after its original release; Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” returning to the Top 10 in 1992 buoyed by a perfect storm of both Freddy’s death and THAT scene in «Wayne’s World».
One thing all of these have in common? Top 40 was either going through a post-Rebirth (MTV-powered gold-rush, more-like) hangover (1986 through 1989) or the Doldrums (1992), to borrow Guy Zapoleon’s famous music cycle. Guess which one we’ve been experiencing since the late 2010’s, at least, even if for different reasons than the ones before…?