What If the Streaming Audience Isn’t So Adventurous?

For the last few years, the glacial progress of new music at current-driven formats has been interpreted to mean that streaming siphoned off the new-music fans, leaving Top 40 in particular with only the most passive, hit-driven users. But what if the streaming audience wasn’t so adventurous either?

There is already evidence of this. Streams aren’t leading even the most open-minded programmers to a cornucopia of great new music. They are revealing a few gems, while allowing “Beautiful Things,” “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and “Lose Control” to linger for a year or more.

There’s further confirmation this week following the release of a music-library test conducted on behalf of Country Radio Seminar by NuVoodoo. In an effort to show the entire landscape of Country consumers, the 755-person CRS study didn’t require all respondents to use Country radio, as most radio-station screeners would. It’s a perspective that isn’t generally seen by pop programmers, but it has implications for all radio.

As a result, there’s a crosstab of 215 “Heavy DSP” respondents, who spend at least 10 hours a week streaming music, although only 7% of those do not cume radio at all. The 400-song music test also included 50 titles with significant streaming activity, but not Country radio airplay, in an effort to establish whether there is support for those songs that Country PDs are overlooking.

There are certainly signs of the streaming era having impacted Country radio, particularly compared to a 2023 test that was dominated by older gold. (Less of that was tested this time.) The top 100 overall titles include Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Shaboozey, Bailey Zimmerman, and lots of Morgan Wallen, the defining artist of the last five years. Those songs are hits with Heavy DSP users and with the audience overall.

But in general, the “Heavy DSP” respondents don’t look profoundly different from the total sample or Country Radio P1s. To some extent, that’s because of the overlap, but it’s significant and encouraging for radio that there was so much overlap. In addition, scores are high for all groups, such that the differences in scores are often merely the difference between great and good. But some highlights:

• The top two songs among Heavy DSP respondents (henceforth also “DSP”) and the total sample are the same: Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and Brett Young’s “In Case You Didn’t Know.” The latter, from 2016, is a ballad that took nearly six months to reach No. 1, and very much typical of the pre-streaming era at Country radio. The No. 3 overall song, George Strait’s “Check Yes Or No” finishes in the top 40 for DSP but still with a comparable score.
• Other songs that do better with Heavy DSP users than with the total sample include “Somewhere on a Beach” by Dierks Bentley, “She Had Me at Heads Carolina” by Cole Swindell (and the JoDee Messina song that spawned it), “Forever After All” by Luke Combs, “Die a Happy Man” by Thomas Rhett, and “If I Didn’t Love You” by Jason Aldean & Carrie Underwood, all songs that now read as solidly mainstream. 
• Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” and Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” both do better DSP, but it’s been more than a decade since those songs shook the boundaries of Country radio, and the difference is, again, between great and good scores. 
• Some of the songs that outperform with Heavy DSP users are older titles such as “I Go Back” by Kenny Chesney, “As Good as I Once Was” by Toby Keith, “If You’re Going Through Hell” by Rodney Atkins, “Gone Country” by Alan Jackson, and “Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You” and “My Maria” by Brooks & Dunn. (There are other older songs that do well with both Heavy DSP users and the whole group, such as Alabama’s “Song of the South” or Keith’s “Should Have Been a Cowboy.”)
• In general, the songs that were not radio hits are at the bottom of the test for the Heavy DSP group as well. The biggest non-radio hit is Morgan Wallen’s “Ain’t That Some” at No. 145 DSP. Max McNown’s “A Lot More Free,” another song that streamed into the mainstream, ranks higher for DSP but is still in the second half of the test at No. 230 among those users.
• Walker Hayes’s “Fancy Like,” a song broken by viral video, is the biggest title of the ’20s at No. 9 with all respondents, although it has a particularly high score against female Heavy DSP users.
• “She’s Somebody’s Daughter” by Drew Baldridge, another song that got an early video boost, actually ranks slightly higher among Country Radio P1s and the total sample than Heavy DSP listeners. (Again, the difference is great vs. good.) The Baldridge is also unique among Country hits in that, after getting its initial boost from the web, it had the same gradual build as many callout ballads.

As with Baldridge, you can find examples of songs that do slightly better with the overall sample or Country Radio P1s than with DSP listeners in almost every sub-genre, and those examples often seem as random as those in the opposite direction. In general, Heavy DSP listeners are there for the hits as Country radio defines them. To the extent that they also seem to like some party songs (“Wagon Wheel,” “This Is How We Roll”) or older songs slightly better than other groups, the profile that emerges is not as much cutting edge as “wedding reception.”

Anecdotally, I’ve seen the wedding-reception profile among many pop DSP partisans as well. As with Pandora, where the media coverage focused on “music discovery” but the eventual usage was “mainstream radio with fewer commercials,” there are undoubtedly those on the pop side who want mostly the hits but choose DSPs to hear the hits exactly when they want them, and with fewer ads. The mix they choose isn’t far from Mainstream AC–“Don’t Stop Believin'” vs. “Lose Control,” but with the ability to acknowledge their own fringe songs.

Seeing the relative similarity between Heavy DSP and the larger group in Country has reinforced my belief that the product shortage and glacial progress of songs at Top 40 isn’t just because “the cool kids left.” That “Beautiful Things” is still in Billboard’s heavily streaming-influenced top 10 is proof that the “newer, faster” audience is being massively outvoted, even at streaming, which makes it a problem when radio and labels want to take their cues primarily from streaming. As in Country, streaming can help bring some records to our attention (Doechii, the magnitude of Kendrick Lamar’s success), but it can’t populate an entire format.

As often noted in this column, Country has a number of advantages right now, including superstar artists, a  relatively healthy label/radio relationship, and a balance of streaming-driven reaction records and callout-driven ballads. The top 10 of the CRS test includes “My Girl” by Dylan Scott and “I’m Coming Over” by Chris Young. A current counterpart, Cole Swindell’s “Forever to Me,” saw its callout kick in well after streaming tapered off. Country labels are often accused of not cutting bait fast enough on passive songs, but there would be fewer hits and less balance without them.

The best suggestion I’ve seen for speeding up Top 40 callout is consultant Guy Zapoleon’s call to rotate records more aggressively at the outset. Another is to do the other things that could drive listening — marketing and addressing spotloads. When more people are listening longer, songs react more quickly, and a larger audience also affects the Hot 100 more. 

We also have to consider that there are still enough people who care about new music at Top 40 for whom the format is failing to deliver on expectations. The stagnation of Top 40 isn’t just because of what happened to the most music savvy listeners, but what happened to labels (who don’t want to work as many songs) and to programmers who don’t want to break music unless they can find a streaming story. There are still plenty of people in the CHR ecosystem who love music and could be making it happen sooner, but not if we punt the music development process to an audience that isn’t that much more adventurous than our listeners.