Every week, there are one or two top streaming songs among our top 20 requests that radio isn’t showing much love. Is it because a song isn’t yet being promoted, or promoted well? Are PDs still waiting for research? Or do they just think it’s too out of bounds for their audience? Sometimes it feels like nearly every song we’ve featured on Mason’s Observations was doing big numbers on streaming before becoming a radio hit. Sometimes radio catches up, as with “Choosing Texas.” Some never get the airplay they deserve.
When we add a song on Liveline, many factors come into play, but any song we ever play before a majority of radio stations is the result of widely demonstrated audience passion on streaming and the audience speaking from a national affiliate base of 70+ affiliates. Unlike the songs on the top 20 airplay charts that don’t generate streams or requests, our choices are never based on label hype. We don’t “work” with indies, and they have never influenced this column in any way.
As we begin emerging from an extremely weak period for music, here are this week’s streaming-driven tracks to watch and why we feel they deserve consideration:
Noah Kahan – “The Great Divide”: Debuted #1 on Spotify on release day. Many major releases from major artists don’t achieve that. Noah Kahan is in a class of artists like Lana Del Rey, Hozier and The Lumineers who are bigger than their airplay and literally sell out 50,000 seat stadiums all over America. His following is huge and the passion is so clear.
“Stick Season” was (and still is) a huge request on Liveline, hanging in the Top 20 long after stations dropped it (or never even moved it into power). It’s going to be a song that comes back every fall for years to come, just like the dreadful Christmas classics that follow it a month later. It is currently back in Spotify’s US top 100 at No. 98.
Requests for “The Great Divide” began coming in on the day it was released, even though we only began playing it two days ago, waiting to see how radio stations would handle it. Last week, it was our No. 17 request and has already had more requests in the past two days than all of last week combined. You’ll likely see that massive jump in requests reflected next week. It is currently #10 on Spotify Daily, and #3 among non-Bad Bunny titles.
“The Great Divide” is No. 41 at radio as of Wednesday. Early supporters are WXKS Boston, his adopted hometown (28 spins this week), but also WIHT Washington, D.C. (43), streaming-conscious KBFF Portland, Ore. (24), and WIXX Green Bay/Appleton, Wis. (32), the type of station that supported the last two hits.
“The Great Divide” is also a five-minute song. We’ve been saying all along that our issue with Harry Styles’ “Aperture” isn’t just its length, but not justifying its five minutes. Radio has a 4:12 edit of “The Great Divide,” but it’s seriously so good that the full-length version would be fine with us.
PinkPantheress, Zara Larsson – “Stateside”: “Boy’s a liar Pt.2” with Ice Spice was a viral hit fueled by TikTok in early 2023, peaking at #1 on Spotify and Liveline requests weeks before Pop radio, where it only peaked at #7 in airplay. We never receive requests for it anymore, but in that moment it was extremely important and Pop was super late to that party. When it did come to radio, passionate fans and social media users were already sick of it and cringed at stations calling it “new music” two months after they’d already heard it on Spotify and in hundreds of videos.
Now Pink is back with Zara Larsson who has struggled for years to break big in America (aside from 2015’s “Never Forget You” with MNEK, #5 on CHR) and the TikTok sensation of 2017’s “Symphony” with Clean Bandit which blew up just over a year ago. She’s had major success in Europe and her home country of Sweden, where dance remains a major force. When I interviewed her a few months ago, she told us, “There’s just a lifestyle of constant movement, new things and a need for energy that I think dance just captures best. A lot of people say it sounds the same or that it’s an old concept. But it just comes down to what makes them feel good, what they can relate to and get lost in and have an experience with that I think American culture has kind of gotten away from. You go to clubs [in Europe] and they are packed five nights a week. That just doesn’t happen [in the US]”.
“Stateside,” which was released in October, was our #16 request last week and is currently #16 on Spotify among non-Bad Bunny tracks. It’s #43 on Top 40 with 25 stations playing it so far, 23 of whom added just this week. San Francisco’s KYLD (67x) and KMVQ (20x) have both been on it for a few weeks now.
