The Format With Two Currents

Four years ago, I wrote an article identifying Mainstream AC radio as “The Format With One Current.” At that time, major-market AC stations were playing an average of eight “current” songs, most of them effectively recurrents. Only one of the Mainstream AC top five songs at the time was still a current on any other chart. At that point, AC stations had long stopped developing their own records, relying on Top 40, then Hot AC to warm songs up. As a result, some edgy sounding songs made it through the pipeline, while ballads faltered because Top 40 would not ratify them.

You wouldn’t expect that to change now. Top 40 has fewer hits to hand down to other formats, while monthly consumer press articles bemoan a general lack of interest in new music among all ages. As three-share Top 40 stations struggle, Adult Contemporary remains one of the healthiest radio formats that plays new music, perhaps because it doesn’t play that much of it. 

But some recent developments at AC have gotten my attention. Based on the current Top 5, AC is now the format with two currents, depending on how you count them. One is “As It Was” by Harry Styles, still top 5 at CHR, even though two follow-ups are in play. The other, “Stay” by The Kid Larsoi & Justin Bieber, is still on the Mediabase Hot AC chart, despite having gone to recurrent at BDSradio.  

Another noticeable change is in some of the titles filtering in below the top 5, which seem to track a little more closely to Top 40 and Hot AC:

• Sia’s “Unstoppable”—a top five Hot AC hit that has spread in both directions to AC (where it is No. 6 Mediabase, No. 7 BDSradio) and CHR. “Unstoppable” has also defied a Hot AC pattern of a song rarely getting past the No. 11-16 range without a full CHR co-sign.
• Nicki Youre’s “Sunroof”—a recent CHR No. 1 that could defy the pattern of “summer songs” not becoming full-fledged AC hits until winter.
• Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which went top 10 as it was peaking in the CHR top 5.
• Elton John & Britney Spears’ “Hold Me Closer,” already hovering just outside the top 10, in part because of the success of predecessor “Cold Heart.” 

It’s a qualified breakthrough for new music. “Running Up That Hill” is 1986’s most-famous mid-chart hit. “Hold Me Closer” is an interpolation of “Tiny Dancer,” which would still test for most AC stations if they had not moved on from ‘70s music. “Unstoppable” is six years old. Its success is driven by two major ad campaigns in three years. With Sia having changed labels from RCA to Atlantic in the meantime, the song is being worked by management-based Crush Music, which has has relied heavily on getting Hot AC and AC stations to put it in callout research, where it comes back as already established with listeners.

“Unstoppable” is tied for most-played current (with “Running Up That Hill”) at WLTW (Lite FM) New York this week. Lite FM has been visibly influenced over the last 18 months by sharing PD Chris Conley with Adult Top 40 WKTU, both in terms of timing and the texture of its currents. Some songs that become WLTW records don’t take hold at the rest of the format—Chris Brown’s “Go Crazy” or Post Malone’s “One Right Now.” But some, like Justin Bieber’s “Ghost” or Kid Laroi/Bieber’s “Stay” become format consensus records. 

In the April PPM ratings, WLTW fell to a 5.1 while Classic Hits WCBS-FM led the market with a 6.3 share. At that moment, I wondered if listeners were chafing. But there was a moment nearly a decade ago—around the time that WLTW championed “Dark Horse” by Katy Perry—that seemed to propel CBS-FM as well, but it was only a stutter-step in the long term. In August, WLTW was the market leader with a 5.9, just ahead of WCBS-FM’s 5.8 and Adult R&B WBLS’s 5.7. Whatever you think of Doja Cat’s “Woman” as an AC song texturally, Lite FM’s success is proof that there’s no magic in playing only 15-month-old songs as currents.

The other takeaway is that it’s good to see “Unstoppable” challenging the notion that only a song that has become a CHR power can be sufficiently warmed up for the AC audience. The cross pollination between CHR, Hot AC, and AC was beneficial for all formats, and can only be so now at a time when new AC stations have greater reach than their contemporary counterparts. 

Finally, both “Unstoppable” and “Sunroof” are songs that found traction through listener-generated videos. Streaming continues to send over songs that feel more AC/Hot AC than CHR texturally—“Glimpse of Us,” “Bad Habit,” “Until I Found You.” In the mid-‘00s, as music supervisors began to create a stream of unlikely CHR hits, I began wondering if a new generation was ready for its own soft pop format. These days, I’m wondering that again. Is there an opportunity to put “contemporary” back in Adult Contemporary?