Throughout our look at the lost hits of the ‘80s, it’s always been clear that the chart game played some part in creating records that seemed like moderate hits at the time, but receive little or no airplay years later. Sometimes the chart game in the ‘80s was “paper adds” to a playlist by radio stations under the sway of independent promoters, sometimes it was just label pressure of the “a sale begins when the customer says no” variety. Exactly which records were hyped how was hard to tell in that era, but our calculation of the “Lost Factor” — the difference between hit status then and airplay now — is littered with songs that never quite seemed like real hits at the time. 

At the beginning of the 1992 chart year, Billboard introduced monitored airplay to the Hot 100, effectively eliminating the paper add, along with the SoundScan sales information that got rid of the record-store equivalent. And as our series moves into the 1990s, calculating the songs of the 1990-94 era with the highest “Lost Factor,” you can definitely see the effect it had by the last two years of that era.

In 1990, there were seven songs that made Billboard’s Top 100 of the year but receive no airplay now. In 1991 and 1992, there were seven. In 1993, there were five. In 1994, there were only three.

The “Lost Factor” calculation is the number of points a song received for its placement on the year’s top 100 — 100 points for No. 1 and so on — divided by the number of spins it received in the seven-day period prior to our calculations. A song with a “Lost Factor” of more than 1.0 is receiving disproportionately little airplay to its hit status at the time. In 1990, there were 51 songs above a 1.0. In 1991, there were 54. In 1992, there were 52. In 1993 and 1994, those numbers were 44 and 40 respectively.

When we looked at “Why Hit Songs Become Lost,” chart hype was only one factor. But by moving into 1990-94, and looking at the difference between before and after certain types of chart hype were eliminated, you can see that the number of songs with a 1.0+ score is reduced by about a fifth, and truly lost songs (those receiving zero spins now) are down by two-thirds.

We chose to focus on 1990-94 here because even with the methodology change, the years are relatively of a piece in terms of what was happening with Mainstream Radio, declining as it was upstaged by Country, Alternative, Hip-Hop/R&B and “Rhythmic Top 40” radio. It was also the last period in which the year-end charts were relatively unaffected by hit songs that were never released as commercial singles, and thus not represented on the Hot 100, although 1994 had one such hit in “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows. From then on, through 1998, the year when Billboard finally stopped requiring a commercial single, mega-smashes that weren’t in the year-end top 100 became a frequent occurrence, from “When I Come Around” by Green Day to “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees.

In the ‘80s, the pattern has been that pop/rock songs are the ones that endure disproportionately to their hit status. In the famous example, “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John fades while “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey becomes the seemingly biggest song on Earth for a while. And in our look at various years, we’ve seen other ONJ hits that are even more lost. Acts such as Bon Jovi benefit from airplay at Classic Hits/Oldies, Classic Rock, the “Adult Hits” stations in between, and often AC stations.

In 1990-94, things are different. Mainstream Top 40 loses influence, then goes into free fall, and doesn’t truly recover until 1997-98.  Rock radio is mostly dormant until the “New Rock Revolution” that follows grunge, but doesn’t truly start to influence pop until “When I Come Around” in 1995. Some of the “rhythmic pop” of the early ‘90s is prominent among our most lost titles, but by 1993-94, those songs have given way to “Real Love” and “Regulate” as Hip-Hop and R&B ascend.

The landscape for where a ‘90s song can endure is different. There are a few ‘90s songs in the Classic Rock canon— both from holdovers (Aerosmith, Tom Petty) and the handful of grunge anthems that the format has adapted. But ‘90s R&B and Hip-Hop has the handful of “Throwback” stations that specialize in it, along with ongoing mix-show airplay at Adult R&B, Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop, and Rhythmic Top 40. A megahit such as “This Is How We Do It” will perform well in music testing for any Classic Hits or even Mainstream AC station willing to consider it. It’s not there yet, but the next song with the universality of “Don’t Stop Believin’” is probably TLC’s “No Scrubs,” a song that also tests for any “Lite-FM” style AC that will play it.

The story is told not just in the songs with high “lost factors,” but those with low ones, under a 1.0. The Petty and Aerosmith songs have high scores based on the Classic Hits/Classic Rock/Adult Hits stations that play them, but the song with the lowest “lost factor” (0.003) is Brandy’s “I Wanna Be Down,” a song we can now say that Mainstream CHR missed (and tried to make good on a few years later with “The Boy Is Mine”). It’s not a huge radio song now, but it receives enough Adult R&B and mix show plays that it overachieves its pop placement of the time. The same goes for a song such as Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear.” It received little airplay beyond Hip-Hop and Rhythmic Top 40, but gets an 0.34 score now.

When BDS-monitored airplay was new in the early ‘90s, one couldn’t help think of the impact it would have had on CHR’s early-‘80s doldrums, when a lot of the biggest R&B and early Hip-Hop hits underperformed or didn’t chart pop at all. It takes very little extrapolation to say that Rick James’ “Give It to Me Baby” would have been a far bigger pop hit than No. 40 if sales were measured accurately and the handful of large-market stations that did play that song were measured for the reach and exposure they gave a song, not its place on a reported numbered playlist.

In 1993-94, the Hot 100 was still a funhouse mirror that didn’t measure the early ‘90s impact of Country or Alternative’s booms of that era. But Hip-Hop and R&B did get their due in a way that they did not in 1980-81. In those “disco backlash” years, Top 40 knee-jerked and gave us two years of soft pop. In 1993-94, those Mainstream Top 40 stations that still existed were acknowledging some of the R&B hits and only the most Salt-N-Pepa-flavored poppiest of the Hip-Hop titles. But with sales represented accurately and Rhythmic Top 40 airplay more influential, it didn’t really matter what Mainstream CHR did this time.

Here are the 60 songs from 1990-94 with the highest lost factor. You can see top 15s for each year here.

And here are 10 songs, each receiving more than 200 spins for the measured week, that are now receiving airplay disproportionate to their year-end placement of the time, our “Turboed 10.”