I never want to schedule “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias. It usually brings to mind 9/11, when it became a hit, often interspersed with audio from the tragedy. I am never quite sure whether to gradually slow down the radio station to keep the transition from being abrupt, or hope a jingle alone lets people forget they were just listening to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
In general, the ’00s category is, if not the weakest moment of the hour on an AC station, the most challenging. For music and radio historians, the early ’00s don’t rankle quite as much as the beginning of previous decades. If you lived through the early ’80s or ’90s, you knew that Top 40 was down, but not likely out. Teen pop and Modern AC, twin pillars of Top 40’s comeback a few years ago, were essentially merged. Teen acts endured; they were just encouraged not to have fun.
Much of the early ’00s is wearing surprisingly well now — back on the handful of ’90s/’00s throwback stations and in surprisingly deep CHR throwback categories. In that time, R&B, Hip-Hop, Linkin Park, and teen punk meant that CHR had something to play, if not necessarily something to own. But many of the highlights of the era aren’t the songs on AC.
When the ’00s roll around, you might hear “Yeah” by Usher, or “Here Without You” by 3 Doors Down, “Family Affair” by Mary J. Blige or “If You’re Gone” by Matchbox Twenty. “Toxic” by Britney Spears or “Bad Day” by Daniel Powter. “Before He Cheats” by Carrie Underwood or “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack. It’s not that all of those aren’t songs people love that continue to earn their place on the radio. But half of them feel particularly savorless on a format increasingly imaged around “feel good,” not just “variety.”
Sometimes the contradictions are within the same artist’s catalog: “Since U Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson or “Because of You.” “This Love” by Maroon 5 or “She Will Be Loved.” “So What?” by Pink or “Sober.” The Timbaland production can be “Say It Right” by Nelly Furtado or “Apologize” featuring OneRepublic.
As TV and movie music supervisors start to exert their influence in the mid-’00s, you start to hear their contributions: “How to Save a Life” by the Fray or “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. Those songs have hipper credentials and more passion — if you haven’t thus far objected “but people love these songs,” you probably are now. They’re easier to finesse than “Hero.” If you played “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt 20 minutes earlier, they don’t feel different enough.
Depending on how your categories are structured (and if they’re chronological to begin with), your ’00s titles are likely helped by the transition from turgid pop to turbo-pop. To research music in the late ’00s/early ’10s was to see the always reliable ballads from Nickelback and Creed quickly evaporate over the course of a few tests, replaced by Katy Perry and Rihanna. For a moment, the music seemed to not just reflect an improved national mood but drive one.
Without disputing the legitimacy of individual songs, I feel the ’00s category dragging stations down more in my monitoring. Perhaps I’m encountering a station that swapped an ’80s position for a newer one, putting greater pressure on a category that didn’t feel deep to start with. Perhaps it’s also because some of those songs are making their way into Classic Hits. Or because they manage to come up near songs of even greater legitimacy but equal somberness from adjacent eras — “Iris” on one side, “Someone Like You” on the other.
If you find the ’00s category frustrating, it will likely morph as more of the rhythmic ’90s test in, perhaps helped by hearing those songs again elsewhere. Like “No Scrubs” by TLC before it, “1,2 Step” by Ciara won’t be a Mainstream AC record until it suddenly is. (Like “No Scrubs” before it, some stations will probably play it with the rap — some by choice, some by not knowing which version to add to the library.)
The ’00s could sound better on AC radio just by being better balanced. I’ve often thought that gold-based radio stations need not just tempo and energy codes for library titles, but also to take into account when songs are “fun” or not. If you are of the belief that music scheduling should rely on rules or AI and less on a programmer’s individual judgment calls, I can tell you from recent listening that we aren’t there yet.
Enrique. Boy, every time I hear Hero I think of 9/11. Doesn’t get anymore sad than that.
I am trying to be more mindful of slow stuff or ballads. When people think throwback, its way more party and lively, not slow and sappy. One good example of mine; I see Lifehouse You and Me has a ton of smart people giving it airplay I can’t bring myself to put it on.
To your examples, no to Because of You (too many other Kellys to choose from) How To Save A Life didnt sound right, and I could only put Chasing Cars on if it became something massive on Tik Tok or in pop culture. I swore I’d never play Iris, and then it was in Deadpool and Wolverine, and had lots of ppl singing it on Tik Tok, so on it went.
The column about the unhappiest songs on radio is an interesting read. I think some of these stations should start thinking outside of the box and look at what songs people between the ages of 25 and 45 actually want to hear.
A sub-group of about 15 music message board members – mainly 30’s and 40’s but also older and a Canadian/American split – recently decided through a tournament that their favourite songs of the 2000’s are as follows, a list that brings in several alternative hits.
01 IN THE END Linkin Park
02 CAN’T GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD Kylie Minogue
03 HUNG UP Madonna
04 COMPLICATED Avril Lavigne
05 IT’S MY LIFE Bon Jovi
06 SINCE U BEEN GONE Kelly Clarkson
07 NUMB Linkin Park
08 BENT Matchbox Twenty
09 I’M WITH YOU Avril Lavigne
10 BULLETPROOF La Roux
11 ARE YOU HAPPY NOW Michelle Branch
12 BYE BYE BYE *N Sync
13 WAKE ME UP WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS Green Day
14 EVERYTHING YOU WANT Vertical Horizon
15 HANGING BY A MOMENT Lifehouse
16 BLEEDING LOVE Leona Lewis
17 IT’S MY LIFE No Doubt
18 BEHIND THESE HAZEL EYES Kelly Clarkson
19 IT’S GONNA BE ME *N Sync
20 BEAUTIFUL Christina Aguilera
21 BRING ME TO LIFE Evanescence
22 UNWELL Matchbox Twenty
23 BACK HERE BBMak
24 NO AIR Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown
25 HURT Christina Aguilera
26 UNWRITTEN Natasha Bedingfield
27 FIREFLIES Owl City
28 ALL FOR YOU Janet Jackson
29 SK8ER BOI Avril Lavigne
30 NOBODY’S HOME Avril Lavigne
PEOPLE GO MENTAL FOR “BULLETPROOF.”
My initial thought was when I read this yesterday, maybe he’s overreacting and overanalyzing a bit. Then I’m flipping through the radio and land on the AC station right as they are going out of girls just wanna have fun, to hear without you, into a promo that says music that puts a smile on your face. So you have a point! AC much like classic hits currently has a perception problem in addition to its indecisive identity. I would expect to hear songs like here without you, chasing cars, you and me, and others on an AC station and so would most average people who remember growing up with those soft rock outlets. And the other issue is, AC has a larger issue than classic hits, if they modernize too much, it’s a hot AC, if they rely too much on gold, it’s too much like classic hits.
By nature, classic hits, and AC are very conservative formats, and because of that don’t have a pipeline of rhythmic music to choose from to immediately put on the air, unless a huge shift was made. I definitely don’t think the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater, so it seems like day parting could solve that slightly. People are in different mood throughout the day, the problem is you don’t know which mood all of your audience is at what time because broadcast radio can’t customize. The final point, to be fair, that transition from girls just wanna have fun, also had a jock weather break that ended talking about rain on Sunday, which sort of eased that transition.
Interesting what you say about straplines changing. Heart over here (which, like many British people, I always seem to hear in the doctor’s waiting room or at the hairdressers) now says “Turn up the feel good!” rather than “More music variety” – a transition made around the time the main station eliminated, and moved to digital-only offshoots (one of which, Heart 70s, was on in my taxi the other night), most of the 20th Century apart from its last few years.
“Chasing Cars” is I think the highest-charting Hot 100 song by a partially Northern Irish act, but some of them are Scottish, so Van Morrison is still I think the highest-charting act in the US wholly from NI – out of the UK’s four constituent countries plus the Republic of Ireland, the only one never to have produced a Hot 100 number one hit.
Frankly I haven’t found either side of that imaging concept — the “feel-good” or the “variety” — particularly convincing for most of my radio-listening life. “Variety” has been an obvious lie on most stations I’ve heard programming these formats for most of the time I’ve been aware of what they were playing. Like, we’re really supposed to be impressed that a barely-varying playlist of mostly high-charting pop/rock hits is sourced from more than one-and-a-half decades? Ah, but you forget that with the pop and rock tunes, we also have ballads (if they’re by rock acts), and dance music (if the acts look like rock when you squint), and maybe even the occasional “oh wow” “spice record”! I hear what the indomitable “Yeah!” might have sounded like in the alternate universe where it was the only song sounding like it to be a hit. Appropriately I might hear a version without Ludacris’s verse even though neither I nor anyone else I knew who liked this song when it was big was hearing such a version.
Can anything be as dreadful as “You Light Up My Life?”
There are a select number of upbeat early 2000’s hits that play well on AC/adult hits radio that really perk up listeners. While I’ve avoided playing songs like “Hero” for the very reason others listed (memories of 9/11), the goal of the station I work for is to pick UP the listeners mood, not make them sad or put them to sleep. So I added songs like “Mr. Brightside”, Crazy In Love”, “Unwritten”, “Baby” by Justin Bieber, “Single Ladies”, “Yeah” by Usher”, “Hey Ya”, mixed with standards like “Drops of Jupiter”, among all the Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, and Maroon 5 hits that came along in that era. One ballad I discovered that adult hit radio seems to have forgotten about is “The Climb”. I added that back into my gold rotation recently and got some instant reaction from females who were young Hannah Montana fans when that came out. Those are the ones I’m trying to target because they are in our target demo today!
I don’t look strictly at numbers when it comes to deciding what to add. I look at what music fits the lifestyle of our listeners. Most of, if not ALL the above songs listed accomplishes that.