In the post-COVID years, radio stations’ callout research has had a pretty clear message. New music finds a quorum more slowly in a time when radio has been fragmented by streaming and listener habits have changed. Songs catch on late and linger forever. Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars’s “Die With a Smile” reached No. 1 CHR before it tested power for many programmers but then tested power for a year after it peaked.
Callout still largely determines whether a song will go into power rotation, based on a recent look at CHR power rotations still dominated by “Golden” and “Back to Friends,” two songs that were streaming phenomena by last summer. For active songs that aren’t yet callout hits, the decision may only be whether to spin a song 105x or 85x. It’s more confounding for a song without streaming or requests. Should PDs continue to wait for “Camera” by Ed Sheeran to kick in? What about a song such as David Guetta’s “Forever Young” that tests but has no other stories?
For several years, Coleman Insights has shared the top three songs in its Integr8 USA national testing in the trade publication RAMP. That top 3 usually confirms the glacial nature of today’s callout, although it also captured “Forever Young” early, likely due to its familiar hook. Beyond those songs, however, there are other stories in Integr8 that can be identified faster than by, say, looking at individual moves at the stations you watch most closely.
- “Camera” and Russell Dickerson’s “Happened to Me” are indeed late-developing CHR hits, post chart-peak.
- Benson Boone’s “Mystical Magical,” a song whose streaming story tapered off before its airplay did, boomed in callout at year’s end, seemingly boosted by its use in Target commercials, and remained strong through early February.
- David Guetta’s current “Gone Gone Gone” has borne out programmers’ faith in it, despite the lack of streaming or request stories.
- While some Country songs only start to test power at the end of a lengthy chart climb, Ella Langley’s “Choosing Texas” has been as phenomenal in callout as in streaming, showing almost instant results.
PDs have long grappled with whether streaming numbers represent their audience. Sometimes that discussion plays out as CHR ponders Bad Bunny or Lil Uzi Vert. But that question pops up for a song as mainstream as Raye’s “Where Is My Husband!” — a seeming hit by every measurement except callout, judging from its Integr8 USA scores. (For most CHR stations, the solution has been sub-power, although KIIS Los Angeles moves it into power this week.)
This week, Coleman President Warren Kurtzman, Executive VP/Senior Consultant John Boyne, and VP/Consultant & Marketing Director Jay Nachlis share their thoughts on how to use callout in 2026, where other metrics come into the mix, and whether to just “play the ranker,” even when it means continuing to pound songs that are nine months old or more. Here are some of the highlights from our discussion.
ROR: With so many other metrics now, what is the case for callout in 2026? Where do your discussions with radio begin now?
Boyne: I would say that there are a lot of analytics available to us, many of which are helpful. And if I were a programmer, I’d want to consider a variety of them. What callout brings to the table is very important in the sense that it is targeted to your target audience. It’s your market, it’s your listeners, the demographics that you need to perform well in. It’s the P1s that you want to satisfy and attract.
The other big part of it is that radio is built differently than on-demand in the sense that we have to create a community we have to satisfy, we have to create a coalition, we have to deliver something that will appeal to many. If something that we play or say has a negative impact, that hurts us. Callout helps us by understanding not just what people like, but also what they’re kind of so-so about and also what they’re negative about.
ROR: We’ve heard a lot about the post-COVID slowdown in how people respond to new music, and that has certainly been confirmed by some of the topline results. What’s been interesting to you in callout over the last year — whether it’s globals or individual songs from this week?
Kurtzman: I think you’re right about how we are increasingly seeing songs stay at the top of the [callout results] longer than they used to, and as a result, it is harder for newer songs to break through and supplant those songs at the top of the ranker. Personally, I think that is mostly a function of the increasingly fragmented way that consumers are being exposed to music. So it’s just harder and harder to find those big consensus songs that the vast majority of listeners of a particular format rally around, and that makes perfect sense to me, given the fragmentation of the landscape.
That you see [the fragmentation of the new music landscape] reflected in callout really speaks to the accuracy, if you will, of our Integr8 service. It reflects a change in the way people consume music, and that makes me feel good about the information that our Integr8 service is providing to its clients.
Nachlis: I would just add that there’s also a shift in how you select songs. It used to be that you had to get to 300 spins before you ever put something in callout. [Now, there are songs with an on-demand story ahead of radio]. So occasionally you will see something pop in Integr8 USA that doesn’t have an established radio story yet.
ROR: Is there a good recent example of that?
Kurtzman: “Pink Pony Club” got huge streaming numbers, and it took a while before it really started testing [even] decently in callout. And now, of course, stations can’t stop playing it, or couldn’t until recently, anyway.
ROR: What about “Golden,” which had its phenomenal streaming numbers and the success of KPop Demon Hunters? Did that come into callout already a hit? Or did it work its way up as the airplay would suggest?
Boyne: “Golden” built. It didn’t start at the bottom, but it did take some time.
ROR; So we’re not yet at the point where a song can become a hit with the radio audience ahead of airplay?
Boyne: [More typically], I’m thinking of some of my Hot AC clients that had never played “Luther,” but they popped it into callout and it did awesome with their audience. So it wasn’t that it didn’t have radio airplay, but it was on different stations than their own. [We see the same with] some Country crossover songs.
ROR: Tell me about the dynamic in Country versus Top 40. Has how songs research at Country sped up in any way as streaming has become more of a factor? Is there a Morgan Wallen effect?
Nachlis: We’re seeing a lot of Morgan Wallen.
Kurtzman: Yeah, we are seeing a lot of Morgan Wallen, but the thing that continues to blow us away about Country is how long some of these songs have been out and getting airplay and getting streaming before [even reaching our criteria] to be tested. That seems like a structural thing in the country-music and Country-radio industry: [that] life cycles are really, really long.
Boyne: What our callout data shows is that the listeners aren’t always on [the industry’s promotional] schedule. Sometimes there’s songs that they know and have grown to love ahead of their turn in line.
ROR: With all of the information available now, if you were programming a station, what would you be looking at in your own music meeting? Would you play the callout ranker as it is, especially when the hits have been so static? Or what else would you look at?
Nachlis: I wouldn’t just play the ranker, certainly. One of the unspoken things that every radio station has to consider when they’re evaluating the ranker is their own strategy and how that plays into those music decisions. Just because a song is at the top of our ranker doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a power for you. [At the same time], it’s good information to know that [even when PDs feel a song is burnt] the listeners are not fried on it and it’s still doing fantastic.
Kurtzman: We’re obviously biased, but we think callout is still, from a pure data standpoint, the most powerful information that you can have access to, which unfortunately not every programmer gets to have access to. There are other tools that are very helpful, whether they are streaming data for my market, any sales data that I can have access to, or airplay data in my format – those to me are all great tools for raising questions about songs that I then get answers on through my callout. That’s still, to me, the best way to do this.
But I think the other thing that we always like to communicate is that there’s still a lot of art to this … there will be songs that will test really well with your target audience that don’t fit your strategy, and there are songs that might be perfect for your strategy that don’t test particularly well. That’s where art and instinct come in, and what still differentiates the great programmers from the mediocre is their ability to apply that thinking.
Boyne: There’s a quote I love from one of our long-term clients and friends. George “Geo” Cook at K104 in Dallas once said a great radio station is in the culture business. Often that means you don’t have the luxury of waiting to see if a song is going to test. You have to take some risks. You have to say, “I’m a brand that has its finger on the pulse, I’m going to play some songs because they’re culturally of the moment,” whether that be a new release from a popular artist, whether that be TikTok, whether that be the Grammy Awards. In time you’ll see if these are songs that have any long-term life on your radio station. But in the moment, there are just artistic and cultural decisions that have to be made.
ROR: What about Raye’s “Where Is My Husband!”? It’s a great-sounding radio song that has tempo. It feels like a record that radio needs now, but it looks great in every metric except callout. How should stations handle it?
Kurtzman: Streaming and requests are two data sources that only reflect positives. What we see in callout is there’s enough negative on it so that the song is not getting very high on the ranker. I’m a little surprised that that song is not testing better. We dug in a little bit further to go beyond Integr8 USA and look at a bunch of individual client stations, and it’s not testing very well in a lot of places. I don’t know why, because it kind of feels like a record that should. It does seem to be doing a little bit better with Hot AC stations than with CHRs. I’m still wondering why it’s getting as much airplay as it is based on callout, but if we don’t see that song take off in another cycle or two, I might start to question how often some stations are playing it.
ROR: One final question: because songs are taking so much longer to kick in, are people being fair to themselves in terms of how much they expose new releases? Should people be playing songs more, especially during the daytime, to get a fair read?
Nachlis: I’ve always believed that once you [decide] on a song, with the exception of those event records that you’re not necessarily going to play for a long time, you should be strategic about it. You’re making a commitment to it, and you know that that song is going to take time to get familiar and take time to potentially test.
I would rather people be much more strategic about when they’re putting that song in so that they do get enough time rather than, you know, flying through things and not giving them a fair shake. Especially now with the way radio TSL is and the way that songs get exposed, it just takes longer and longer for these songs to warm up. And we have to take that into account as well.
