Six weeks ago, with Kate Bush scaling the charts, I asked Twitter followers what new song was as exciting as “Running Up That Hill” resurfacing. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Top 40 needed new music with the same excitement. KNDE (Candy 95) College Station, Texas, PD Rob Mack responded. “Not song but artist” — specifically Harry Styles and Post Malone. “From what I’ve seen, their singles, albums and tours have had the audience invested and excited.”
Since that time, some major CHR stations have done something they have not done in a while — gone on to the Styles and Malone albums to play songs that aren’t being worked as singles.
It shouldn’t be surprising that some CHR stations are playing “Music From a Sushi Restaurant” ahead of that song being officially promoted as a single. Styles has two songs in power rotation at a Top 40 format still desperate for hit songs and core artists. “Sushi” is featured in an Apple AirPods ad. It isn’t such an act of radio-programmer daring.
But for the last decade, one of the central themes of this column has been the lack of music enterprise at radio. Finding the next hit, or your own hit, from the superstar album used to be a regular practice. Then came the week in 2014 when Taylor Swift’s 1989 dropped and no CHR station found a second song to play until “Blank Space” was designated as the next single. We’ve seen three currents from a single artist — Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande — played simultaneously by CHR in recent years, but usually because the label asks.
That’s why it’s worth noting that “Sushi” is No. 39 this week at BDSradio CHR, while another Styles album cut, “Daylight,” is receiving just under 100 spins. Post Malone’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger” also received immediate airplay at some major Top 40 outlets, even as the official single, “I Like You,” grew. A number of those stations have since backed off, but BDS still shows about 90 CHR spins. WPOW (Power 96) Miami is playing several new cuts from the Beyoncé album. KENZ (Power 94.9) Salt Lake City is still playing Dua Lipa’s two-year-old “Hallucinate” after nearly two years and 2000+ spins.
The stations with “Sushi” in relatively high rotation are an interesting illustration of CHR’s neural pathways. Its biggest supporter, WXKS (Kiss 108) Boston, isn’t a station known for going “off the menu.” Neither is iHeart sister WWPW (Power 96.1) Atlanta, although KYLD (Wild 94.9) San Francisco is one of Top 40’s most aggressive major-market stations.
The Kiss 108 airplay extends down the I-90 corridor, including both WFLY and WKKF Albany, N.Y., and both WPXY and WKGS Rochester, N.Y. Both WKKF and WKGS are similarly programmed iHeart Kiss FMs. WFLY is independent. WPXY has long been aggressive about finding its own songs, but now sister station KUDL (The End) Sacramento, Calif., is starting to play many of those same songs. “Sushi” is on both CHRs in Chicago, WBBM-FM (B96) and WKSC (Kiss FM), and both CHRs in Portland, Ore., KBFF (Live 95.5) and KKRZ (Z100). It’s on two of Salt Lake City’s three CHRs, but KUDD (Mix 107.9) is playing “Daylight.”
A few stations were already more proactive than most about finding their own hits. Patrick Davis at KHKS (Kiss 106.1) Dallas has a long history of finding a left-field song or two every year. It was early on “Wrapped Around Your Finger” but has backed off. WPXY and KUDL are both still strong supporters of that song, however. WPXY PD Mike Danger’s left-field titles include Canadian hit “Headphones” by Banx & Ranx, two from the Alternative chart — Dirty Heads’ “Life’s Been Good” and Panic! at the Disco’s “Viva Las Vengeance” – and Frank Ocean’s “Lost,” long after TikTok activity briefly brought it back to the fore.
I’m not under the impression that an extra Harry Styles or Post Malone song is going to single-handedly fix the CHR format and its long list of issues. In addition, one of those issues is artist separation. When stations last routinely mined album cuts, power rotation was 75x a week, not 112x, which makes wedging in an extra superstar title that much harder, if that’s the only place you’re comfortable looking.
But, of course, we’re better off with any PD enterprise on music than without. It makes more sense to play “Sushi” when there’s excitement about both the song and Harry’s House than to try and frontsell it as “new music” three months from now. It makes stations more interesting, it puts more musical inventory on the shelves, and it returns proactively looking for music to the job description. I hope it turns out to be the right move, and that we see more of it.
