There are just so many temptations for a journalist when a song called “Levitating” rebounds at radio. “Levitating floats on?” “Levitating is magic?” “PDs say it’s now a hit/they’re a tad bit late/Dua Lipa and Da Baby/had to levitate?”
“Levitating” peaked at No. 4 on Jan. 18 according to BDSradio and began losing spins in the week of February 8. If it was classified as a current, which is how many CHR stations are now playing it, it would be the No. 5 song in the country. (Ironically, the song it would push from No. 10 to 11 would be Dua Lipa’s “We’re Good.”)
Stations have not done numbered playlists for years. When they did, a station might on a rare occasion “re-add” a song it had dropped, usually at a high chart number. Songs are rarely truly dropped now, and the lines between current, recurrent, and “off” are fungible. But if this were an old-style playlist, Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” would be a re-add at No. 4 or 5 (or higher) for those stations now playing it in power.
In early February, the large-market stations powering “Levitating” were mostly those owned by Cumulus, Entercom (now Audacy), or smaller owners. The song’s biggest iHeart-owned large-market supporter was WXKS (Kiss 108) Boston. Now “Levitating” is in power in every top 10 market except one. Many of the stations powering “Levitating” were playing it somewhere between 60-75x in its peak week, although there are a few stations like KDWB Minneapolis (18x) or WFLC (Hits 97.3) Miami (54x) where it is a sharper reversal.
At a station like KMVQ (Now 99.7) San Francisco that was “power then, power now” on “Levitating,” the song has received more than 3,200 spins over the last year. (Most other stations began playing it in late September/early October.) WWWQ (Q99.7) Atlanta and Kiss 108 are both around 2,900 spins, according to BDSradio.
As recently as three weeks ago, I wrote that there was a chance of Song of Summer 2021 being an actual summer song, rather than a winter or spring holdover. There didn’t seem like an obvious choice among the current hits to become this year’s lingering “Sucker” or “Blinding Lights,” in part because the tenacity of “Blinding Lights” (as well as Dua Lipa’s previous hits “Don’t Start Now” and “Break My Heart”) meant that no uptempo winter monster had really emerged. That is no longer true.
By several accounts, the issue for those stations not powering “Levitating” in January/February was familiarity. Top 40 radio was at its most challenged at the time — a format of three-share stations impacted not just by COVID-era listening habits, but also by December’s disruption of listening by Christmas music on Adult Contemporary radio. It would have been hard for most songs to kick in. “Levitating” was also in the extensive shadows of “Don’t Start Now” and “Break My Heart” for some stations.
Should stations have just powered “Levitating” anyway in January, regardless of what callout showed? I understand if that would have felt like grade inflation for a song just because it had tempo and was a great radio record. What happens in the world beyond callout is another issue. A medium-market station without callout trying to decide what to do in February could have followed the lead of Kiss 108 (100x that week) or Kiss-FM (WAKS) Cleveland (40x). What most choose to do is just follow the chart, where losing spins in the aggregate turns out to be more important than any individual story.
I would thus avoid declaring that the system worked on “Levitating” and listeners embraced it only when they were ready. There might have been nothing Top 40 could do in its weakened state in January, but the ratings show that the format doesn’t work with 14 viable currents that take eight months to break either. “Levitating” will play all summer, and I’ll be happy to hear it because it didn’t reach saturation in January. But Top 40 still needs another 20 songs like it and needs to do the work to develop them.
When Dua Lipa won the “Best Pop Album” Grammy, her “thank you” list included the Warner Records promotion team. “Don’t Start Now,” “Break My Heart,” and now “Levitating” have helped radio continue to prove its value in creating real hits that help drive streaming metrics, rather than just scrambling to catch up with them. It’s also evidence that the audience that likes “Astronaut in the Ocean” or “Rapstar” isn’t uninterested in an uptempo, major-chord hit record when one comes along. Lipa’s speech also acknowledged that she had once been afraid of not being taken seriously unless her music was sober before deciding “happiness is something we all deserve.”
Interestingly, you can find support for tempo in the streaming world now, too. The top two songs on Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits playlist are “Levitating” and Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More.” “Levitating” maintained a strong presence on Today’s Top Hits, even as radio backed off. In fact, sometimes the uptempo pop balance records that seem like mid-charters for major-market programmers endure longer on TTH. Miley Cyrus & Lipa’s “Prisoner” stayed there long after radio was done. Ava Max’s “My Head and My Heart” is there now.
Just as the notion of what constitutes a TikTok record has expanded to include almost everything over the last year, the traditional pattern of active and passive records is being disrupted as well. A CHR PD may regard Imagine Dragons’ “Follow You” as an Adult CHR record, but it’s on Today’s Top Hits as well. (So, for that matter, is Pink’s duet with her daughter, “Cover Me in Sunshine,” a No. 2 song in Australia that wasn’t worked to radio here.)
I’ve written in the past that Top 40 radio has somehow reached a backwards place where programmers expect balance records to stream but active records to test. “Levitating” followed two massive hits, and came from a hip artist, meaning it initially hit the wall at No. 4. Other tempo songs start to struggle well before reaching the top 10. Marshmello & Halsey’s “Be Kind” peaked at No. 14. A year later, “Be Kind” is only on a few CHRs but one of them is WKTU New York, where it did well enough that even AC sister WLTW (Lite FM) tried the song for a few weeks, despite it never having been a CHR power at the time.
How songs develop has become complex, but in a way that should be helpful to a song like “Levitating” that can have a streaming or a callout story. It’s a good thing when uptempo songs that sound great on the radio can do that. Until we have more great records than we can play again, programmers should not be finicky because a song does not have both consumption and callout. Unlike “Blinding Lights,” I can say that I’m not tired of it yet, in part because it didn’t reach airplay saturation.
