‘AT40’ vs. The Lost Factor

Every Saturday at noon, author Tom Nichols live-tweets the vintage American Top 40 countdown on Sirius XM 70s on 7. In the first hour, you can pretty much count on these things happening. 

• If the year is 1974 or before, somebody in the thread will suggest that Nichols make good on his longstanding threat to live-tweet an ‘80s countdown episode instead. 
• Somebody, often Nichols, will tweet something like, “I’ve never heard this. What is this piece of garbage?” When that happens, there are decent odds of it being a song I love. But it might be a song that I didn’t like on first listen either.
• Another listener will be unfamiliar with a song, and ask, as @MecCoffee did last week, “How does this happen when I listened to the radio for hours every day back then?”

That last question seems easy to answer. It makes sense that any song peaking in the chart’s bottom third could be missed by somebody at the time. Last week’s countdown was May 8, 1976. In the mid-‘70s, major-market Top 40s averaged 25-30 current songs per week. Music enterprise and regional differences meant those 25-30 songs were different across the country. If it was important to you to know about the hits beyond your market, you were one of the people who sought out AT40.

I was definitely one of those people. By then, I was following the charts, and had multiple radio sources to hear different types of hits — three local Top 40s, an adventurous AOR, small-market ACs, out-of-town AMs at night. But I was a few months away from having access to AT40 every week or being able to buy Billboard regularly. I didn’t yet know every song. I also had no access to R&B radio at the time. No. 24 was the Blackbyrds’ “Happy Music,” an R&B hit I didn’t hear until years later. When I started studying the charts soon afterwards, I would discover a top-10 song from just a few years earlier that was new to me and many other near-hits.

The weekly AT40 comments made me wonder about the typical frame of reference for those listeners who loved music but didn’t live and breathe music growing up. And how did that frame of reference intersect with the Lost Factor, our formula for determining the difference between songs’ prominence as currents and their airplay now? Were there any new insights to be gained by combining the two?

We chose Billboard’s top 40 songs for the week of May 14, 1983 — a moment when CHR’s comeback was exploding. A year after our initial calculations, we recalculated Lost Factor for those songs — year-end chart points divided by the last seven days of monitored airplay according to BDSRadio — to produce fresh airplay data, but also to have consistent spin counts with those previously unmeasured songs that didn’t make the Top 100 of 1983. Only 10 songs on that week’s AT40 did not make the year-end chart.

Then we took the additional step of asking approximately a handful of Ross On Radio readers to look at the May 14, 1983, chart and try to recall which songs they were aware of as then-current radio hits, vs. which they did not learn until later, if at all. We specifically looked for readers who were not yet in the business or following it closely yet; only one person was a regular AT40 listener, and his recollections were based on what he remembered hearing on local radio.

These are the 40 biggest hits in the land on May 14, 1983, along with their chart peak, year-end number (if any), and recently calculated Lost Factor. We did not attempt to calculate a Lost Factor for those songs that did not make the year-end chart, but you’ll see that they offer insight of their own.

Overall Lost Factor scores were relatively low in 1983 — in our original calculations, the highest LF was a 21; in some other years during the ‘80s, it’s around a 60. (In the early ‘60s, there is one song with a perfect Lost Factor score of 100.) Only a third of the Top 100 of 1983 had a Lost Factor above a 1.0 — our baseline for a song not getting airplay proportionate to its popularity at the time — when we measured last year.

In this spring of pop-music rebirth, the stats are even more impressive. The highest Lost Factor for any song in our new calculations is 15. Only 12 songs out of 40 have LF 1.0 or higher. Out of the 10 songs that didn’t make the year-end countdown, two of those songs are now getting significant airplay. In other words, half the songs on that week’s countdown can be said to have endured in some way. 

But you can definitely see a pattern to those songs that do not endure. We asked a handful of readers to take a look at the May 14 chart and name all the songs that they did not know at the time (one listener who was following the charts named the songs he heard only on AT40). 

• The 18 songs with a Lost Factor below a 1.0 had negligible mentions. There were indeed a few listeners (mostly those just turning on the radio around that time) who didn’t know even “Come On Eileen” or “Little Red Corvette.” But the combined “did not know” mentions among our 11 readers averaged 0.7 per song.
• The 12 songs that had a Lost Factor of 1.0 or higher averaged 2.9 “did not know” mentions among them. In that group, eight out of 11 readers did not think they heard Champaign’s “Try Again” on the Top 40 stations they listened to. Four each did not remember our Lost Factor leaders — Laura Branigan’s “Solitaire” and Rick Springfield’s “Affair of the Heart.”
• The 10 songs that didn’t even make the year-end list had an average 5.6 “did not know” mentions among them. Two songs, Patrick Simmons’ “So Wrong” and Robert Ellis Orrall & Carlene Carter’s “I Couldn’t Say No,” were unknown to 10 out of 11 respondents. Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger in My House” and Kenny Loggins’ “Welcome to Heartlight” were unknown to seven of 11 at the time.

Over the last 13 months, we’ve noticed that many of the songs with high Lost Factors now are songs that were never quite real hits to begin with. Like “Affair of the Heart” or “Solitaire,” they were songs propelled by an artist’s career momentum — Springfield was coming off two big LP projects; Branigan was following up her “Gloria” breakthrough — but not power-rotation songs for the whole country. (Another song running on follow-up fumes, Bob Seger’s “Even Now,” missed the Top 100 and is a song that nearly half our respondents don’t remember as a current.)

The correlation between the songs heard on the radio now and the songs people remember hearing in the first place becomes even more obvious if songs missed the year-end chart. Songs such as “So Wrong” or “Some Kind of Friend,” Barry Manilow’s attempt to contemporize, are remembered by radio people and chart fans. But they weren’t even known by average listeners. The pejorative “turntable hit” meant a song that had airplay with no sales. That term is often applied to any song that didn’t make it to power rotation, but these are the true turntable hits.

If you were listening to the actual AT40 broadcast this week, Casey Kasem had interesting factoids for several of the least-remembered songs:

• Simmons was serving as this year’s chairman of “Bikers Fight Against Muscular Dystrophy.”
• Manilow had been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records for highest one-day gross sales for his recent Broadway engagement.
• The most unlikely front-sell was Kasem quoting from a Cash Box story, by current Billboard Country Update writer Tom Roland, about the Country-radio resistance to the pop-leaning “Stranger in My House,” including a quote in favor of the song from then-KLAC Los Angeles MD Cathy Hahn.

There are two songs that didn’t make the year-end Top 100 in 1983 that receive significant airplay in 2021. Duran Duran’s “Rio,” the subject of a new book this week, got 555 spins last week. None of our readers cited it as a song they didn’t hear when it was new. ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’” got 1,006 spins last week. Notably, there are three readers who say they didn’t hear it at the time. (An AOR smash, “Gimme All Your Lovin’” began ZZ Top’s CHR crossover, but not every station played it until after their biggest hit, “Legs,” a year later.)

If you’re wondering why we made good on Nichols’s threat to choose an ‘80s countdown, it’s because we asked readers to help choose the year to spotlight. By a few votes, the largest number asked for 1988-89, with strong support for 1973-74 as well. Ultimately, we went for the middle in part because those songs are better remembered and less polarizing than 1973-74 or the likewise-polarizing late ‘80s. But if you enjoyed pitting the Lost Factor vs, AT40, let us know. The countdown might just roll on.