In December, it was a significant achievement when Taylor Swift had a hit song that was a consensus power at Top 40 for the first time in six years. “Delicate” had been that perhaps briefly. Nothing from Lover had been. Part of the genius of Swift’s pivot to Americana was that “Cardigan” and “Willow” did not have to be powers; they could exceed expectations by peaking in the top 20.
“Lavender Haze” wasn’t quite a consensus power, in part because “Anti-Hero” hadn’t vacated the slot for most stations. It still went top five and was a power for some of the more pop-based CHRs that I watch most carefully. There are still major-market CHRs where it’s getting 50-60x spins a week.
“Karma” is clearly a consensus power, and the second-fastest-growing song at CHR. “Karma” is also something we don’t have much of these days, a legitimate third hit from an album, and one released at the once-traditional nine-month remove from the first single.
Then there’s the fastest-growing and most-added song at CHR this week. Lover’s “Cruel Summer” was a bringback at a handful of CHR stations when I wrote the Song of Summer Handicap a month ago. Last week, Swift told fans that “Cruel Summer” was earmarked as a single for summer 2020, a remnant of the 1989 period when Swift’s singles from a project were taking more than a year to play out. But Lover wasn’t providing a year’s-worth-of-singles momentum at the time. Then the pandemic cancelled Swift’s tour and sent her in a different direction.
The Reputation and Lover albums seemed to mark the end of Swift’s imperial period. Even Miss Americana, the early 2020 documentary made with Swift’s cooperation, acknowledged Swift entering a post-superstardom phase. Now, Swift has six albums in the top 25 of the Billboard 200. Lover is up 12*-10* this week. Reputation is No. 24.
Swift had waded into the summer-song battle in 2019 with Lover’s roundly derided “Me.” Now, she has two contenders for Song of Summer 2023 and one of them is from the same four-year-old album. There’s also airplay for “Hits Different,” from the expanded version of Midnights. Before “Cruel” and “Hits,” there had been CHR enterprise airplay for “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” a song left off Lover. (There’s also the recut “I Knew You Were Trouble [Taylor’s Version],” which, because of chart classification rules, still sits in currents, rather than among gold titles.)
There’s also that Swift Eras tour this summer that you may have heard something about. Some CHRs, most recently KDWB Minneapolis have used it for elaborate renaming the station stunts. But even WTDY Philadelphia used the local Swift shows as a hook for evolving from CHR to Hot AC.
In December, I noted that “Anti-Hero” had allowed Swift to do something that few artists managed to pull off — successfully giving the audience the sound of “old Taylor.” Usually, by the time artists are willing to do that, the audience has moved on. More important, the combination of Folklore, Evermore, and Midnights allowed Swift to escape that “everything she does is wrong” period documented in Miss Americana. That artist trajectory is rarely reversed.
In three years, Swift went from preparing for her post-imperial period to being the artist who can most clearly be said to be in an imperial period. The moment where Swift occupied the first 10 slots of the Hot 100 seemed to some chart watchers to be only a reflection of what a loyal fanbase could do to the Billboard chart under its new rules. It feels different now that we’re experiencing actual Taylormania.
All of the current Swift accomplishments are likely new to you only in their synthesis here. But looked at through a wide lens, they remind us that:
While Top 40 was never entirely out of business with Swift, it was certainly cynical about her by 2020. When “You Need to Calm Down” went to No. 1 at Adult Top 40 but not Mainstream CHR, it was the latest in a long-established pattern of a superstar whose audience had matured. Now, as CHR itself moves closer to Hot AC, Miley Cyrus and Ed Sheeran stand beside Swift as a reminder not to dismiss those core artists that we might need again someday.
Albums matter. Catalog matters. Swift’s Eras tour is all about the power of a robust catalog. Part of the reason that Mainstream and Adult Top 40 have so few core artists at the moment has been the streaming-era strategy of releasing fewer albums and fewer follow-ups to existing hits. The second-most-played Swift single at CHR is “Style”; the fourth is “Wildest Dreams.” At the time, those were the sort of nice-but-not-immediate songs that could only become hits when an album like 1989 became phenomenal. The industry prides itself now on not “milking” albums. But those songs endure, as it happens, and help reinforce superstardom.
Swift matters to radio (and listeners) because radio matters to Swift. Swift was raised on radio and fostered by radio. She built a transcendent fanbase and fashioned herself into a generational artist. But Swift continued to have a radio veteran, Frank Bell, as her radio liaison. Folklore and Evermore could have taken her away from radio altogether for at least a moment–think Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Instead, it helped affect a radio rebound and brought her to Triple-A. Even when her reception at radio was cool, Swift continued to engage with radio and we are glad she did.
“Cruel Summer” has been available for four years. To be fair, there were CHRs that tried to play it at the time. WSPK (K104) Poughkeepsie, N.Y., spun “Cruel Summer” nearly 700 times before returning to the song as a current last week. KHKS (Kiss 106.1) Dallas already had 500+ spins. In the truly cruel summer of 2020, Swift upending her own game plan was almost certainly more effective than a fourth Lover single would have been. (At the time, I was more disappointed about “Paper Rings” not being a single, especially when “Blinding Lights” scored with a similar retro groove.) The Eras tour alchemy does make “Cruel Summer” a different entity today. But one still wonders what radio might be overlooking now.
We are better off when there’s programmer enterprise. I’ve written before about the dismaying moment where nothing from 1989’s except “Shake It Off” received airplay until “Blank Space” was officially designated a second single. Radio felt it didn’t need enterprise then, especially in those last few moments when radio’s hegemony and labels’ long-term planning had not yet been upended. It took dissatisfaction with “Look What You Made Me Do” for stations to look for other songs from Reputation, and a no-singles strategy for them to acknowledge the excitement of Folklore.
I was happy to see “Lavender Haze” emerge immediately from Midnights (likely helped by Swift making radio part of her strategy to dominate the top 10 that week). It has been exciting to see the pockets of airplay for “All the Girls” and “Hits Different,” as well as the emergence of “Cruel Summer.” Finding secret weapons from superstars used to be something CHR did regularly. Clearly, radio is most comfortable doing that with an artist of Swift’s magnitude, and with the help of streaming stories. But radio doesn’t have enough hits right now to rely entirely on streaming finding 2-3 unicorns a year.
Looking for a bringback? How about core artists? As broadcasters, as music lovers, and as parents, many of us are really enjoying this new Taylormania. Suddenly, we have our mother/daughter coalition back (even if it’s now mothers and grown daughters) and a little bit of uniculture again, and we’re realizing that we weren’t really so happy without it. Superstars never, well, go out of style.
So maybe CHR and Hot AC shouldn’t give up on the concept of fostering core artists, and neither should labels. As with songs themselves, streaming can only do so much to foster artists. To the extent that Country currently seems healthier than CHR (and is now filling a void in CHR), it is the existence of core artists and the emergence of new acts with the potential to become core. Top 40 radio is not thriving under our current paradigm, but labels are laying people off too, and not just in radio promotion. (So are USPs.) If we now think the old artist-centered strategy involved throwing good resources after bad, then we need to come up with a new one.
