Country, Crossovers, and Country Crossovers

One of the surprises of the current pop-music product shortage is that there hasn’t been more crossover from other formats. If labels have decided that fewer pop records are worth promoting, one hopes that would create opportunities for hits to come from other formats, bringing their stories with them. To be the “best-of-everything” format that listeners equate with a healthy CHR, there should be hits from R&B/Hip-Hop, from Alternative, from Contemporary Christian, from AC and Adult Top 40.

But as so many current-based formats struggle, Alternative doesn’t seem to have the topspin to send songs over. Neither does Hip-Hop/R&B radio, although there’s the unlikely asterisk of the years-old crossovers from Miguel, Chris Brown, and the Weeknd. Contemporary Christian is healthy in both ratings and excitement about product; it should be on programmers’ radar more than it is. AC and Adult Top 40 are still too willing to let CHR set the agenda, even though it passes down fewer playable songs now.

Country is the exception. Over the last six weeks, Kane & Katelyn Brown’s “Thank God” has been joined by Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night.” (“One Thing at a Time,” the single being worked to Country and climbing the charts just ahead of “Last Night” would fit at pop, too. Two other Wallen album cuts are being played by at least one CHR station.) Wednesday morning, I received the e-mail blast that Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car” is being promoted to Adult CHR, although there are Mainstream CHR stations playing it as well.

During the late ’10s, Combs, Brown, and eventually Wallen were the good news that Country radio needed badly. Soon, streaming would give Country some potential excitement on a regular basis, even if some PDs still struggle with it. Now, all three of those artists have the potential of a pop hit at the same time. And suddenly, there are echoes of 1981, a peak year for Country crossover.

It’s easy to understand why Country crossovers are the ones proliferating now.  

• Country, despite any travails in the streaming and COVID eras, is still bigger than any other format that plays a significant number of currents and can more easily influence CHR or put a song on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Country radio often shares operations managers and programmers with Top 40. Of all the music that streaming can put in front of CHR programmers, it’s the easiest for them to get a handle on. And if you do follow streaming, you might become aware of phenomena like “Rock and a Hard Place” or “Something in the Orange” before they’re even on Country radio. That allowed Top 40 to grasp “Fancy Like” before every PD did, and helped nudge Country to play both Wallen currents at once.
• CHR hasn’t really had an uptempo pop center for a while, which makes it harder to be normative about what a pop record sounds like. Does “Fast Car” fit? Did Jvke’s “Golden Hour”? (There was already a path for female singer-songwriters in 1988, but Tracy Chapman stuck out, too.)

Not every Country PD is excited about the music coming from streaming. Very few of those songs performed well in the older-dominated national music test at Country Radio Seminar. But stations such as KSOP (Z104) Salt Lake City or WPAW (The Wolf) Greensboro, N.C., that embrace the new music are successful. Country is still the format with the most excitement about a body of new music.

Top 40 has been inconsistent with Country crossovers over the years. There were a lot of them during the “Urban Cowboy” boom of 1980-81. That dwindled to nothing when CHR product was healthy again in the mid-’80s. In the Garth boom of 1992-93, many Top 40s went Country outright but those that remained chose not to publicize the hotter rival. The Faith Hill/Shania Twain crossover boom of the late ’90s came when Country radio itself was languishing. Country and Top 40 both flourished in the early ’10s — the first time that had happened in 50 years; then both formats cooled off musically, but the pipeline continued to flow for Sam Hunt and Dan + Shay.

The Urban Cowboy boom peaked during CHR’s “disco backlash,” actually a drought in R&B crossovers overall. But Country crossover and disco were actually growing simultaneously through the 1970s. Country and R&B songs were often covered in each other’s formats, and the biggest moment of Urban Cowboy was probably Kenny Rogers and Lionel Richie together on “Lady.”

In 1980-82, Country crossovers were sometimes among the most anodyne records of the CHR doldrums (“Looking for Love”), sometimes the hottest (“Driving My Life Away”), sometimes singer-songwriter outliers (“Seven Year Ache” by Rosanne Cash), sometimes surprisingly traditional (“Elvira”). Urban Cowboy at Top 40 and AC would have been better if R&B had been more represented and the rest of the music was consistently better. “Through The Years” by Kenny Rogers wouldn’t have bothered me so much in spring 1982 if it wasn’t on the radio at the same time as “Key Largo” and “I’ve Never Been To Me.”

In 2023, Country crossovers will be better if they’re additive. We’re at that time of the year, just ahead of the summer song derby, where new releases are starting to flow a little more freely, but it’s unlikely that Top 40 will find itself with too many hit songs. If we were to also find two hits apiece from every other chart, Top 40 would obtain the inventory it needs and be closer to its best self. Having multiple genres and something-different-every-song is variety. Having Country as one of two or three disparate sounds is disjointed.

That’s particularly the case when two of the three Country crossovers are ballads; only Wallen is a bouncier midtempo record. The three songs are hits, but Top 40 still needs to address its lack of tempo and “fun factor.” That’s getting better on a daily basis because of the spring/summer product, but cherry-picking other formats would help, too. It would be nice if Country could share another “Fancy Like” as well (the “Elvira” of 2022). Country could still use more “fun factor” as well.

In the late ’90s heyday of Shania Twain and Faith Hill, Country radio wasn’t sure it liked playing or sharing so many AC crossovers. At this moment, Country radio should be glad for crossovers because it helps records develop faster, making for fewer songs that need a year to climb the charts. With every current format challenged to some degree, one of the things that broadcasters can do for their entire cluster is to have as many stations as possible legitimize each other. More crossovers bring hit music closer to a shared experience again.

For the last 15 years, Top 40 often has wanted its own records from multi-format artists. R&B acts released a single for each format. Rock or Country acts appeared on Top 40 singing EDM hooks. It will be better for every format if superstars are showcased by the same song across the dial. Part of the success of Latto’s “Big Energy,” not quite replicated by her “Lottery” or Meghan Thee Stallion’s “Sweetest Pie,” was having an accessible, uptempo rap record that fit on both Hip-Hop and Top 40 radio.

Because CHR has been inconsistent with Country over the years, pop audiences are never sure whether to expect it. There’s also that 30% of the market, even in a format stronghold, that just doesn’t like Country. One Top 40 PD tells me that every new crossover occasions at least a few calls and texts from listeners who come to CHR to not hear Country. I’m guessing those people will be happier with a station that’s truly the best of everything, meaning there’s not the same expectation of loving every single song.

There’s an interesting place in the top 30 of Mediabase’s Adult Top 40 chart this week where you find Wallen next to the Jonas Brothers and, a little further down, Christian AC’s For King + Country, Active Rock’s Shinedown, and Hip-Hop’s Coi Leray in succession. Those are all songs currently below the proven-hit cutline, but it’s still a nice thing to imagine at Mainstream Top 40 before summer’s end.