By almost any measurement, “Die With a Smile” by Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars was a smash from the moment of its release on August 16. Like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” a few months earlier, it reached the point where people who don’t follow today’s hit music somehow knew it, or where you might encounter somebody singing along to it in public.
Two weeks ago, when Ross on Radio looked at the various measurements that determine a hit song, “Die With a Smile” was one of only four songs that had a story in all three of the metrics that the industry looks at — TikTok, Spotify (as a measurement of streaming overall), and Shazam — as well as one recently made available in this column, the weekly requests for the nationally syndicated LiveLine show.
What “Die With a Smile” hadn’t become, at least at that moment, was a consensus power-rotation song at Top 40 radio. Even when “Die” went to No. 1 on the CHR chart, it was only in power — defined here as more than 100 spins a week or in a station’s top three most-played songs — at about 60 stations, or about a third of Mediabase’s Top 40 panel. In the top 10 markets, where local callout research usually factors into those decisions, it was an obvious hit in some markets — San Francisco, Atlanta, Los Angeles — but not all of them.
The last few years have shown the challenges of callout writ large — as the Top 40 music audience becomes increasingly passive, with the format’s reach diminished, callout is more static than ever, and with it the charts. Yet, two weeks ago, the David Guetta reworking of Alphaville’s “Forever Young,” a song that has grown stealthily over the years since 1984, debuted at No. 1 on Coleman Insights’ Intergr8USA’s syndicated national callout.
All of this sends us back to some ongoing questions:
- What does callout mean now?
- What should power rotation on your radio station be?
- What sort of stories should you be looking at in determining whether a song belongs on the radio station?
All of those questions sum up to the bigger one: “What is a hit in 2024?” In early summer, the top 10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 aligned surprisingly well with what Top 40 was playing. This week, we’re back to the top 10 being seven just-released Kendrick Lamar album cuts (some of which will indeed follow “Not Like Us” to radio), Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas,” a summer holdover (Shaboozey), and Gaga/Bruno.
For years, power rotation comprised the nine biggest songs on your radio station — then seven, then five, then three or two as rotations increased and consensus hits narrowed. For the most part, those songs carried some measure of both strength and excitement. When a song wouldn’t stop researching power, or bounced back into power, it meant that song was a unicorn, not that every other available song was weak.
By 2019, that paradigm had already been pretty well demolished. By then, power rotation at major-market stations was already heavily recurrent-driven. That might line up with some programmers’ notion of “just play the hits,” but CHR has been largely a format of low-rated radio stations ever since. We let our most passive listeners drive and they fell asleep at the wheel.
Even with other choices for music discovery, I still believe that the promise of exciting new music is essential to Top 40 and other current-based music formats. In the 10-minute listening occasion that has become our average, I would hope to hear one consensus smash, one exciting new song, and one oldie — preferably a creatively chosen one. If I heard that, and something exciting between the songs, I might even give you 20 minutes.
What we call “power” now has increasingly become “power recurrent” (or “stash” or “stay-current,” as programmers of a bygone age called them). I believe those records are absolutely important for providing three minutes of guaranteed strength on your radio station. Play them 85x a week in their own rotation and they’ll do what they’re supposed to. Fill your real powers with five such songs and play them 113x a week and you will be stale.
“Power” to me still needs to carry some reasonable combination of strength and excitement. I would not load up a 3-5 song rotation with only songs that don’t yet test like “Die with a Smile” or a song that might never test like “Hot to Go!” In general, though, I feel that most powers are visible a few weeks earlier than we adopt them, and songs like Gaga/Bruno that matter in every other conceivable way sometimes can be powers.
The third most important rotation on a station is, for me, “Power New” — the equivalent of the new-releases bin at a record store (or atop a streaming portal or iTunes Music Store). It’s the rotation that needs the most curation from programmers, who don’t have much time for music enterprise these days. But if I was trying to break a song, I would give it at least a week in “power new” to make sure it got heard, since starting a song in nights/overnights only does not.
The hardest songs for me to judge are the ones that see their initial excitement slow to a more middling momentum. In recent weeks, the Weeknd’s “Dancing in the Flames” and Tate McRae’s “It’s OK I’m OK” have started to justify the many weeks in rotation that radio gave them after the initial new-artist excitement slowed down. But there are a lot of songs like that between No. 9 and No. 25 now that have neither strength or freshness, and it’s hard to know which deserve your continued support. It would be easier, as consultant Guy Zapoleon has noted, if radio would give new songs more spins sooner.
I’ve been a music researcher for the last 20 years, and I still absolutely believe in callout, when used correctly. The Alphaville-type stories that it unearths are the most fun. If the Guetta record is benefitting from the familiarity of the original. I don’t regard that as a false positive, because I believe it means that people will enjoy the Guetta song when they hear it. (And, by the way, we’ve had a ton of remakes and extrapolations in the last two years, and the remake factor blesses very few of them.)
The best use of any type of research has always been using it as a tool to empower programmers to put songs on the radio, not just to take them off. Until radio has too many hits to find room for all of them, it’s fine to take a shot on a song that has just one or two stories. If there’s any way of confirming your gut, it’s even OK if one of those stories is just “this sounds like a hit to me.”
Sean, to me, this is pretty simple. For stations that use the right hook for this song (“if the world was ending, I’d wanna be next to you”), it would be testing like a power pretty much everywhere. For stations that have a research budget, choosing the right 10 seconds is the most important thing we can do to make sure our music is right. And I think sometimes we don’t think about it like that.
Always fascinating discussion about music popularity Sean and thank you for the mention Sean. I’m still a big believer in callout research as a primary determiner of the most popular songs for power rotation.. Why? because its a random sample of a radio station’s fans and listeners. I also obvious that most active music lovers live on streaming platforms and a majority of music listeners on radio are slower to pick up on “hits”(which is why we need to spin newer songs faster as well) Again, with Nielson being the yardstick for rating radio stations and determiner of station revenue, you have to target your radio listeners especially the ones who are heavy users of the medium, if you want to get big ratings. Look there is no question that Streaming is the most popular way to consume music. But because we don’t know who the fans are by race age or sex I think it’s dangerous to use streaming as a primary way of creating powers which needs to be the foundation songs(spokes) that hold weaker songs together in your hour of music. Yes, I’ll agree that a streaming song that stays on top of the Streaming charts for weeks like Gaga and Joel is a powers for a nice chunk of Top 40/CHR stations as you mention or at least should be a power-testing song in callout eventually. By the way, David Corey is so right…over the years I’ve literally found so many songs potential hit songs that had the wrong hook and when the correct hook was put in the song rocketed to #1 in callout. The famous one for me was one that Andrea Ganis found for Icona Pop’s “I Love it” not using the overly repetitive hook but a compelling 12 seconds from the chorus. Which brings, up the other problem with callout which is using too short a hook, which especially when a song is new, is not nearly enough time to identify an unfamiliar song. . With so few true consensus hits these days we can’t afford to lose a single one because of a bad hook
Andrea Ganis was head of promotion for Atlantic Records Icona Pop’s label and a music industry legend.
I was thinking about what could be a great idea to increase powers of surefire hits as well as bringing in new product to big tracks from hit albums, crossover hits from rock, alternative, AAA and Hot AC, and discovering new talent from TikTok, or potential new artist support. That’s what I came up with an idea that pop stations could do: A segment called “Play It or Leave It”.
I’ve pitched that idea to Chat GPT to enhance my idea, and here’s what it came up with: A “Play it or Leave it” segment could be an engaging way for CHR/Pop radio stations to involve listeners in programming decisions while keeping the lineup fresh and appealing. Here’s how it could work:
Concept:
• Segment Timing: Air during peak listener hours, such as drive time or evening shows, to maximize participation.
• Song Selection: Feature tracks from various categories, such as:
• New singles from established artists.
• Crossover hits from other genres (e.g., rock, alternative, or country).
• Tracks from up-and-coming or unsigned artists.
Execution:
1. Introduction: The host introduces the song, giving context (e.g., “This is a new single from [Artist],” or “This rock track is making waves. Should it cross over to CHR?”).
2. Play the Song: Air a snippet or the full track, depending on time constraints.
3. Listener Votes: Open the phone lines, text platform, or app poll for listener feedback.
• Play it: If the listeners love it, it could move toward heavy rotation.
• Leave it: If they don’t, the track gets shelved or reassessed.
4. Results Recap: Share the listener feedback live or on social media.
Benefits:
• Audience Engagement: Involves listeners directly in shaping the station’s playlist.
• Discovering Trends: Helps identify which new songs resonate with your audience.
• Cross-Promotion: Provides opportunities to promote the station on social media with hashtags like #PlayItOrLeaveIt.
• Artist Feedback: Artists and labels get real-time listener opinions, helping them gauge their music’s impact.
It’s a very interesting opportunity for CHR pop radio to regain its influence as it is losing ground to streaming and TikTok.
you mean Smash It Or Trash It?
Yeah, sort of like that!