The Lost Factor 1997: Even in a Comeback Year, Some Songs Don’t

It was the year of the Top 40 comeback, driven by teen pop, Modern AC, bigger Hip-Hop/R&B crossovers, and heard on a rapidly growing number of Top 40 stations. But 1997 was also a year that challenges the calculations of the Lost Factor.

The Lost Factor is our calculation of the difference between a song’s popularity at the time and the airplay it receives now on broadcast radio, according to BDSRadio. We divide year-end chart points by spins for the last seven days. Our measure of that popularity is derived from a song’s placement on Billboard’s Top 100 songs of the year. In 1997, those didn’t include “Don’t Speak,” “One Headlight” or “Men in Black,” because they weren’t singles.

In 1997, there were also a half dozen double-sided singles that charted at Billboard, sometimes using a previously album-only hit to bolster a new title. So how to compute Lost Factor for Jewel’s “Foolish Games” and “You Were Made for Me”? Or Toni Braxton’s “I Don’t Want To” and “I Love Me Some Him”? Or particularly Billboard’s No. 1 song of the year. Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997” got negligible airplay even at the time. But its B-side, “Something About the Way You Look Tonight,” attracted plenty.

For extra perspective, I turned to former radio syndicator and veteran chart watcher Josh Hosler. Hosler has maintained a “Pop 100” chart that has different rules for weighting of airplay vs. sales and removal of recurrent titles, but, most importantly for our purposes, includes songs that weren’t commercial singles. Hosler uses the charts for, among other things, his Pop Music Anthology, an extensive series of Spotify playlists going back to the very beginnings of recorded music and covering every era since. It was the Pop 100 that I used to calculate the most enduring songs of the year.

Looking back at “Candle in the Wind 1997” is particularly timely. Recently, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan published an article bemoaning the impact of BTS fans on the Hot 100, particularly their willingness to buy multiple mixes of the same song. That led Slate’s Chris Molanphy to recount the long history of label chart machinations, as well as reduced overall radio exposure for hits during COVID-19. In a subsequent Twitter thread, Breihan softened his comments.

In 1997, John’s single went 14x platinum with almost no radio, and would have easily been phenomenal with or without the inclusion of “Something.” At the time, it was almost unheard of for consumers to buy a single for a souvenir, not a radio hit. It’s not uncommon now, although it will take a pretty exceptional song to sell 14 million copies now.

Here are the 15 “most lost” hits of 1997. The Lost Factor is calculated on points for a song’s year-end finish on Billboard’s annual top 100 songs, divided by the number of plays a song receives now. In parenthesis is the “lost factor,” followed by the number of spins last week in the on those stations monitored by BDSRadio.

Elton John, “Candle in the Wind 1997” (lost factor: 100, BDS spins last week: zero)
Az Yet f/Peter Cetera, “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” (82, 0)
98 Degrees, “Invisible Man” (56, 1)
Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, “Look Into My Eyes” (54, 0)
Journey, “When You Love a Woman” (44, 0)
Boyz II Men, “4 Seasons of Loneliness” (36, 2)
Coolio, “C U When U Get There” (35, 0)
B-Rock & the Bizz, “My Baby Daddy” (33, 0)
R. Kelly, “I Believe I Can Fly” (32, 3)
R. Kelly, “Gotham City” (31, 0)
Merril Bainbridge, “Mouth” (30, 2)
Jock Jams, “The Jock Jam” (29, 0)
702, “Get It Together” (27, 2)
Bruce Springsteen, “Secret Garden” (24, 1)
Toni Braxton, “I Don’t Want To” (21, 2)

There are a few asterisks here. One is that Braxton’s year-end chart placement was boosted by the inclusion of an R&B-radio-only hit on its B-side. The big one is that BDS does not show separate spins for “Candle ’97.” Rival Mediabase does and the song received one spin for the period monitored — the song’s Lost Factor would have been the same for one spin or none. Doing Lost Factor calculations against Hosler’s “Pop 100,” there is one additional song — Amy Grant’s “Takes a Little Time” — that would had a 22 Lost Factor, but was never released as a commercial single.

Some of our perennial categories are prominent among the Top 15 — veteran artists, teen idols, R&B hits driven by sales disproportionate to their pop airplay. One Lost Factor veteran dodges the top 15, however. Barbra Streisand’s duet with Bryan Adams, “I Finally Found Someone,” had a Lost Factor of 12. It would be the No. 21 song. Madonna’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” would be 19 with an LF14.

As for the two acts credited with helping spearhead Top 40’s resurgence in early 1997, they have several songs under a 1.0 and thus not “lost.” Hanson’s “Mmmbop” has an 0.84. Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” has an 0.22, but even the follow-up, “Say You’ll Be There,” has an 0.82.

I did use Hosler’s calculations to determine those songs that now receive airplay disproportionate to their year-end rankings at the time, reaching at least 100 spins last week. In the past, I’ve referred to those songs as “Lucky Stiffs,” because they didn’t seem quite as big at the time as they do now in the Classic Hits pantheon. Some of these were R&B smashes still played at Adult R&B radio. Some were big hits that just didn’t happen to be singles.

Dave Matthews Band, “Crash Into Me”
Erykah Badu, “On and On”
Aaliyah, “One in a Million”
No Doubt, “Don’t Speak”
Notorious B.I.G., “Hypnotize”
Third Eye Blind, “Semi-Charmed Life”
112, “Cupid”
Notorious B.I.G., “Mo Money Mo Problems”
Backstreet Boys, “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)”
Puff Daddy & Faith Evans f/112, “I’ll Be Missing You”

Hosler’s playlists for 1997 (or any other year of the 1990s) are available here. More information on Lost Factor, with calculations stretching back to 1960, can be found here.