The 100 Most Lost Songs of the 2000s

Every now and then, listeners to SiriusXM or online-only radio will inquire as to how a song can have such a high Lost Factor score if they’ve heard it on the radio recently. Last week, I heard “Untouched” by the Veronicas on the radio. It sounded terrific. Of course, it was on Top 40 Nova 106.9 Brisbane, Australia, which was celebrating the ARIAs — their version of the Grammy Awards — with an hour devoted to former winners. In Australia, “Untouched” is a song I still encounter on the radio.

In America, however, “Untouched” is unplayed by the large- and medium-market stations that were monitored by BDSradio through the month of October. Its Lost Factor — year-end Billboard Top 100 points divided by the number of spins (zero, in this case) for the previous week – is LF 30. That made “Untouched” the most lost record of 2009 — a year of explosive Top 40 growth — but only the 14^th-most “lost” song of the decade.

The No. 1 song in our calculations was “Runaway Love” by Ludacris f/Mary J. Blige. “Runaway Love” is a devastating piece of social commentary and a reminder of a great rapper’s versatility. It was a documentary that people found hard to watch twice and didn’t stay on the radio very long, even when it was a current.

We published the top 10 year-by-year Lost Factor rankings last week, so many of the patterns have already emerged. Radio Disney and other teen-idol acts, are heavily represented. So are American Idols, including the coronation song at No. 2. Clay Aiken’s “This Is the Night” and the No. 15 “Inside Your Heaven” by Carrie Underwood both prompt the question of whether a song is “lost” if it was experienced by most people a half-dozen or so times (between finals weeks and next-day morning-show airplay).

The artist most represented on the Lost 100 is R. Kelly, with four solo songs and two other guest appearances. Some readers were expecting “Ignition,” one of the biggest hits of the early ’00s, to be the No. 1 Lost Factor song, but it was actually still getting a small handful of spins. By comparison, the No. 3 “I’m a Flirt” and No. 8 “Thoia Thong” barely surfaced at Top 40 radio and would likely be high on this list under any circumstances.

The second-most represented artists are Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, each with three songs. In 2003-04, Simpson’s “With You” was embraced by a Top 40 format desperate for uptempo pop. One of the next songs of that sort was Spears’ “Toxic.” That song clearly endures, while Spears’s breakthrough hits have rebounded. But Simpson is doubly penalized as both a former teen idol and a female pop act in the tradition of Olivia Newton-John or Sheena Easton.

As usual, superstar overflow titles are also well-represented here. Besides Spears, Beyoncé, and the Backstreet Boys, Eminem makes an appearance, just a notch behind Asher Roth. Here are the Top 100 Lost Factor songs of 2000-09. In coming weeks, look for the all-time Lost Factor rankings from 1960-2009 as Lost Factor wraps up its initial cycle.