Living With Chronic 25-54-itis

During the early-’90s CHR radio crisis, you would occasionally see a trade publication article asking if the format was suffering from “25-54-itis.” Younger listeners had been siphoned off by Hip-Hop and Alternative, and some CHR stations’ response was not to fight for them, but to play “Hold on My Heart” by Genesis or some other AC-leaning title from a veteran act approaching the end of its hit streak.

“25-54-itis” was driven by advertiser demand for upper demos during the early-’90s downturn in radio advertising. Some stations fled CHR altogether, others publicly retooled as Hot ACs, some never officially changed but evolved in that direction anyway, including WKRQ (Q102) Cincinnati. Some of the Hot AC evolutions were still occurring in the mid-’90s, even once the format seemed to be rebounding.

During the early ’90s, I had to acknowledge that some of the healthiest stations through the format doldrums were WKRZ Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; WXLK (K92) Roanoke, Va.; and others that remained conservative and adult-leaning. I wanted CHR to deal with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Rump Shaker.” The enduring stations were playing “When She Cries” by Restless Heart and Eddie Money oldies. It wasn’t to my taste, but I had to admit it worked, while the few CHRs that tried to replicate MTV’s rap/rock mix were struggling.

The 25-54 discussion was heated. When CHR’s fortunes improved, I once wrote about a station that had already evolved back to Mainstream Top 40. The PD was briefly annoyed with me because I wrote that the station had “recovered from 25-54-itis.” Ultimately, many CHRs followed the music back in the late ’90s and realized then that the music was so strong and mass-appeal that they didn’t have to choose. 

Similarly, in the late-’00s/early-’10s CHR boom, the mother/daughter coalition that powered Top 40 was so strong that radio didn’t really have to make a decision between upper and younger demos. Unwritten was the knowledge that if owners ever had to choose, of course upper demos would win over, say, 12-to-24s. But at that moment, targeting 18-34 worked remarkable well for the families whose members fell on each side of that demo as well. The same went for Country, where, after “Cruise,” stations had 18-24 listeners without specifically playing to them.

Today, pursuing 25-54 listening is less of a choice than a reality. Nobody has accused a radio station of having “25-54-itis” for a long time, because now it’s a function of going where the available listening is, rather than deliberately ignoring younger listeners because we can’t sell them to advertisers. Some CHRs wonder if 18-34 is still the target, or if they should think of CHR as a 25+ format. 

In this moment of CHR confusion, many of the same adult-leaning heritage stations are the format’s most successful outlets: WKRZ; WXLK; WIXX Green Bay, Wis.; WVSR (Electric 102) Charleston, W. Va. Those stations fall at different places on the format spectrum, particularly when it comes to Hip-Hop and R&B, but in general they are faster on Country crossovers, and less likely to power something like “Cry for Me” by the Weeknd than their big-market counterparts. I disagreed with them in 1993. They are the stations I watch most closely now. So is Cincinnati’s Q102, which while still self-identifying as Hot AC lands in a similar place.

For the last five years, I have generally believed that any return of CHR’s mother/daughter coalition would depend on getting adult women back first. During the late ’10s/early ’00s, there wasn’t much for that listener, and the daughter was under the earbuds streaming something even more extreme than what was on the radio. But I do wonder what a 17-year-old thinks about that approach? Do younger listeners feel like they’re sitting through too much music not their own, even if their only exposure to Top 40 is short spans of forced in-car listening?

The signifiers of 25-54-itis in 1993 were too much gold, resistance to R&B/Hip-Hop, and older library titles. Liveline’s Mason Kelter, who is in the traditional CHR demo, has been particularly unsparing in his column on songs by long-running acts, but as part of an overall concern about any airplay hits that don’t stream or generate requests, even by more recent artists. He is, however, fine with playing older gold on Top 40 — the equivalent of WKRZ keeping “More Than a Feeling” in the library into the 2000s, even if that’s “Iris” or “Dreams.”

The endurance of certain older titles is in keeping with our knowledge of today’s younger listeners as the less-siloed generation. But does that translate to an endorsement of the library-driven CHR that some stations are doing now? An occasional TikTok infatuation with a Connie Francis or Lesley Gore album cut doesn’t signify a larger interest in the early ’60s. However universal “Toxic” or “Poker Face” might be now, I think there is still a point when a 17-year-old might hear five golds an hour, as part of a heavily recurrent mix, and think both “this is not my music” and “this is not ‘today’s best music.’”

It is helpful to Top 40’s decisions at this moment that there are a lot of mainstream-pop records that streaming audiences and younger listeners happen to like anyway. There are just enough Sombr and Ravyn Lenae-type hits of undeniable legitimacy that work both for the current radio audience and the listeners radio needs to recruit. I think of “Ordinary” by Alex Warren as very much a 1992 or 2003 doldrums song for adults. Often what I’m hearing about “Ordinary” however is, “my daughter loves that song.” It’s interesting to look at SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio format and realize how pop many of its hits are — even if the rest of pop radio hasn’t gotten to them. 

In a format that will play “Not Like Us” or “Nokia,” we can’t say that there is quite the same fear of Hip-Hop hits that Top 40 displayed in the early ’90s. But did they play “Dark Thoughts” by Lil Tecca enough, proportionate to its streams and requests? Shouldn’t more stations already be on “Shake It to the Max (Fly)” by Moliy? From my POV, it’s one or two Hip-Hop and R&B titles that CHR radio is missing. But I do suspect that for some 17-year-olds, it might be a lot more, and I wonder how that should best play out on Mainstream CHR.

We’re at a place where the hits are “not quite as good as a year ago but getting better every week.” If that continues, pop radio might indeed get to a place where the demo issue takes care of itself again. As for actively recruiting the younger listeners whose tastes don’t align with today’s Top 40, streaming ought to allow more broadcasters to have their own equivalent to TikTok radio. More about that in weeks to come.