It began with a social-media question about two Bob Seger hits. “I have a friend who claims to have never heard ‘Night Moves’ nor ‘Against the Wind’ in the 43 years he’s been alive. Is this scientifically possible?”
Post by @todgoldbergView on Threads
It’s a fun question for radio programmers to ponder. Both songs are older than that particular listener, a friend of author Tod Goldberg. Then again, both songs were top-five hits at the time. Both did well enough to go to recurrent, and then to radio stations’ gold libraries in multiple formats — often the first test of a song’s long-term endurance.
When we looked at the “Lost Factor” — our measure of the enduring nature (or lack thereof) of various hits — several years ago, both “Night Moves” and “Against the Wind” were getting more than a proportionate amount of airplay to the hits they had been in 1976 and 1980 respectively. They had a score of 0.06 and 0.1 respectively; higher than 1.0 would have been “lost.”
Airplay for those songs hasn’t changed significantly in the four years since I began calculating the Lost Factor. Today’s Mediabase panels represent different stations (and a different number of them) than the stats from the now-defunct Broadcast Data Systems. But airplay has remained surprisingly stable. “Night Moves” got 680 spins last week (vs. 691 when first measured.) “Against the Wind: had 499 then; 487 now.
“Against the Wind,” as some posters noted, was briefly in the movie Forrest Gump. The listener in question had seen the movie, but not registered the song. When I asked my daughter if she knew it, she immediately replied, “Yes, it’s in Forrest Gump.” But then she added that she couldn’t conjure more than the title.
After a year, Threads has at best diluted, but not displaced, Twitter/X. That said, Threads has turned into a surprisingly robust place for music discussions. Goldberg’s original Seger post drew about a hundred comments. For at least a few respondents, those songs had never left radio.
Post by @boojobonezView on Threads
But there are plenty of reasons somebody might not know “Night Moves” and “Against the Wind” — including a number specific to that song.
- At Classic Hits in particular, there is only one consensus Seger title, and that’s “Old Time Rock & Roll” — a mid-charter in 1979, but a song with a few years’ extra currency in listeners’ frame of reference thanks to the movie Risky Business. It’s also one of the most enduring ’70s songs as Classic Hits whittles down the decade overall.
- At Classic Rock, “Turn the Page” has become the enduring Seger song, but even its spins are diluted by the Metallica cover that younger-leaning rock stations play.
- The person in question was born a year after “Against the Wind” was a hit (and four years after “Night Moves”). Despite the resurgence of “Bohemian Rhapsody” around that time, discovering music from “before your time” didn’t happen with the same regularity that it does now. And even now, it doesn’t happen consistently. And Classic Hits is dealing with a target audience that often wasn’t around for “Summer of ’69” as a current, much less songs 5-7 years older.
- In 1994, when that listener was 13, a lot of their peers were listening to Alternative, Hip-Hop, or both. The stations playing those songs at the time would have been Classic Rock or Mainstream AC. (In that era, Seger wasn’t yet an “Oldies” artist, although “Old Time Rock & Roll” was, for obvious reasons, one of the first songs added when Oldies stations did begin playing the ’70s).
It’s also worth noting that Seger’s music was conspicuously absent from streaming services until 2017. Before then, I remember seeing at least one article suggesting that Seger was damaging his place in the classic rock canon. My guess is that the passage of time is a bigger culprit – when I began testing music in Canada 15 years ago, Supertramp and Queen were both similarly huge and enduring — but that article did come to mind.
In general, people are inconsistent with the songs that they know and don’t. It depends on when they started listening to pop music, what their parents listened to, and whether they were away from the radio at some point (e.g., summer camp). Also, as the response to Lost Factor made clear, the songs that endure now are somewhat different if you have access to SiriusXM vs. relying on what large-market stations still play.
Everybody has been made to feel old at some point by the song that their kids didn’t know was a remake. Mine was the Sweet Sensation late-’80s version of Diana Ross & the Supremes’ “Love Child,” and the person who didn’t know it was only a few years younger than I was. Streaming, syncs, and the rise of Classic Rock/Classic Hits radio among younger radio listeners have helped listeners with a lot of songs “before their time,” but the entire history of hit music is still a lot of songs to learn.
Listeners want to bond through music. Some of that is finding friends who like the same music, but there’s also an expectation that friends will have the same frame of reference. For one responding poster, “Eight Miles High” by Husker Du should have been a common-currency song. But for most people, even the semi-hit by the Byrds is obscure now, despite its historical significance as early psychedelia.
Post by @scottkmurphyView on Threads
Similarly, the closest I’ve ever come to being shouted down in social media was when I asked if Wilco was known enough to count as “dad rock.” Even if their fans were now of a certain age, I didn’t think their commercial mainstream footprint was large enough to have become now unhip. But there was certainly a quorum among the original poster and his friends. It was also likely generational, most of what I would have thought of as “dad rock” (including Seger) involved bigger hits, but it was also a generation older than Wilco.
I went to school in Southeast Michigan at the height of Seger’s stardom. There, his musical footprint was massive — going deeper than the hit singles and back well before his 1976 breakthrough with Live Bullet and then the Night Moves album. There are about 20 Seger songs in my phone; none of them are “Night Moves” or “Against the Wind,” both of which are permanently fried for me, even as I encounter them less often on the radio.
It’s interesting to note that Seger’s most truly lost hit was also his most recent, relatively speaking. “Shakedown” was No. 1 in 1987 and the No. 9 song of the year, but with a lost factor of 2.6 (well above the threshold) and a song rarely encountered on broadcast radio. That song is back in the Shazam top 200 because of the new Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, although there were bigger boosts for “The Heat Is On” by Glenn Frey and “Hot in the City” by Billy Idol. The former disappeared from the radio over time; the latter has been lost for years. Perhaps in a year, we’ll be wondering how somebody could not know any of those songs.
I know someone who, in his 69 years on this planet, claims he’s never heard an entire Taylor Swift song and couldn’t name one. Given her ubiquity, is that scientifically possible? Indeed it is, cause I’m that someone.
And Classic Hits is dealing with a target audience that often wasn’t around for “Summer of ’69” as a current, much less songs 5-7 years older.
That alone is worth an article for obvious reasons.
In fact, there are songs that have long been heavily covered that have no recognizability to most of today’s listeners. Another example of music that is historically significant and has long been heavily covered by bands that perform in folk festivals, classic country circles, etc. is the Bob Dylan composition that was introduced to a somewhat larger public by the Byrds’ version on their now-legendary Sweetheart of the Rodeo album and would become a Top 10 country hit in 1989 when Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman of the Byrds sang lead with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on the Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2 album called You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere. The Sweetheart of the Rodeo album is one of THE prime examples of a band’s most famous album that wasn’t a decent seller at the time.
In the mid-70’s I was in high school, listening to CKLW at night in PA. I was hearing Super Max and Ted Bear play Bob Seger songs before he became big nationally. I remember Max saying Seger was going to be big. As I’m sure most know, Bob had a huge supporter in MD Rosalie Trombley
For me, “Old-Time Rock and Roll” is pretty much a special case at Oldies/Classic Hits: I’m pretty sure that it was part of the regular playlist during the earliest years of WOLX–even if it otherwise wasn’t venturing too much into the ’70s at that point. If there’s one Seger song that I thought would’ve endured more, though, it might be “Hollywood Nights”–even taking into account its recent use by the L.A. Kings.
Not surprisingly, I was also exposed a lot to the original “Eight Miles High” during the ’80s/’90s. I might not have even been familiar with Hüsker Dü at all until the early ’90s. And, as far as “Hot in the City” goes, I still remember it first as the theme to “Booker” (the “21 Jump Street” spinoff).
The ‘meta-narrative’ here is that even before the internet/streaming media, people’s tastes and/or musical recall will vary a LOT. Growing up in vanilla radio land of NYC (out of reach of WLIR/WDRE), yet I could have easily skipped over Journey in favor of The (English) Beat and Suzanne Vega (which I did), and most country music (which barely made a dent, even after “Urban Cowboy”). For those of us who continue to listen to anything classic (hits/rock/SiriusXM), it seems odd to not know Bob Seger’s hits but I can’t dismiss it out of hand.