Today vs. Yesterday — Recurrents and Gold Win Another Round

There’s always hope for new music in mid-April, when new offerings queue up as Song of Summer contenders. Two weeks ago, we had new Lady Gaga & Doechii and an uptempo Teddy Swims song. Last Friday, there was a new Olivia Rodrigo song, and this time she led with tempo, not a ballad. We can still hope the “Song of Summer” contenders look more like 2024 than last summer’s crop.

For now, anyway, it’s hard to create excitement around “new music,” judging from the changes at 2Day FM Sydney. Last March, the Australian CHR began promising “hits before they hit” and declared itself in its visual presentation to be “2Day AF.” The change, including a campaign to spotlight more Australian music, was a major story not only in the radio trades, but in Australia’s business and consumer press.

2Day FM had been one of the earliest major CHRs to start relying heavily on “throwbacks,” years before COVID and the slower charts of the epidemic years prompted many North American CHRs to do the same. So embracing new music was a major statement. For most of 2025, there was no sign of the revised format moving the needle as ratings essentially ran in place. In the fall, the station’s new morning show, likewise part of the changes, dissolved.

In the recently released first Australian ratings survey of 2026, 2Day FM was up 3.7-4.4. But last week, I tuned in and the “hits before they hit” slugline had been replaced by “better music and more of it,” accompanying a musical segue to either Hot AC or a very bright AC, depending on your classification. With Hot AC rival KIIS 106.5 dealing with the loss of Kyle & Jackie O, 2Day may have seen an opportunity to “go back to what they’re known for best,” as an Australian message-board poster termed it.

2Day’s segue may be the first time I’ve stumbled upon a format change in the wild in years, rather than reading about it in the trades (or being involved with it as a consultant/researcher). Unlike a year ago, there was no fanfare. A week later, the only acknowledgment of the change was in consultant Craig Bruce’s “Game Changers” podcast. ARN finally spoke to the trade press earlier this week. Around that time, the second survey came back and 2Day’s old format was up 4.4-4.7 (but still well behind its contemporary rivals).

Here’s 2Day on the morning of April 14:

• Madonna, “Like a Prayer”
• Lola Young, “Messy”
• City High, “What Would You Do?”
• Elton John & Dua Lipa, “Cold Heart”
• Train, “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)”
• Sonny Fodera f/D.O.D. & Poppy Baskcomb, “Think About Us”
• Britney Spears, “Baby One More Time”
• Ed Sheeran, “The A-Team”
• Sean Paul, “Temperature”
• Sabrina Carpenter, “Please Please Please”
• Matchbox Twenty, “Unwell”
• Meduza, “Lose Control”
• Coolio, “Gangsta’s Paradise”
• Taylor Swift, “The Fate of Ophelia”
• Colbie Cailalt, “Bubbly”

It’s worth noting that 2Day FM never stopped playing gold or going back 20 years for songs. Even during the “hits before they hit” year, it kept its popular R&B Fridays, which draw heavily on the early-’00s era of R&B and Hip-Hop dominance. In that regard, it’s similar to the most-aggressive major-market U.S. CHR, KMVQ (99.7 Now) San Francisco, which can be as surprising on old titles as new ones.

When 2Day found new music that differentiated it from American CHR, it was often by acknowledging several major-artist tracks at once–e.g., not letting Sombr’s “12 to 12” fall through the cracks. The most enterprise was with new Australian music. The most recent song that I discovered on the radio, an Amy Shark song referred to in its metadata as “The Biggest Ick,” was a few hours old when I first heard it, with the real lyrics, on 2Day.

Even radio’s most enterprising PDs tend to look to streaming, rather than ear picks, when they deviate from the charts. That’s harder now because, despite the perception of streaming as a new-music cornucopia that has stolen away all the adventurous listeners, our various streaming outposts have also done as much to bring back older music as they have in creating exciting new hits.

• Two annual national music tests from NuVoodoo presented at Country Radio Seminar have both shown Country music’s streaming-only listeners to be more conservative and more interested in gold than their radio-fan counterparts. The streaming phenomena acts that Country radio is often accused of wrongly ignoring barely register even among streaming partisans.
• Spotify’s showcase playlist, Today’s Top Hits, does still has songs that U.S. radio hasn’t yet acknowledged; e.g., “Rein Me In” by Sam Fender & Olivia Dean and Raye’s “Click Clack Symphony.” As with radio, there are also recurrents in its top 10 (Justin Bieber’s “Daisies”) and lingering older titles throughout (“Manchild” by Sabrina Carpenter, “Fame Is a Gun” by Addison Rae, “No Broke Boys” by Disco Lines & Tinashe, “Ordinary” by Alex Warren, “Messy” by Lola Young, “Timeless” by the Weeknd).
• Streaming has also shown the continued strength of much-older titles — “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers, “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, and Fleetwood Mac’s 49-year-old “Dreams,” now joined by the 50-plus-year-old “Landslide.” At this writing, Justin Bieber & Nicki Minaj’s “Beauty and a Beat,” a song I liked well enough during the boom of “turbo-pop,” has been propelled into the top 10. Being reminded that we do not have 10 songs that are better than a second-string Justin Bieber hit is not encouraging.
• Two years ago, amidst the excitement of the Summer 2024 offerings, industry observers noticed that fewer older songs were resurfacing. That changed when Stranger Things returned DJO’s “End of Beginning” to prominence. Streaming has also brought back Dominick Fike’s 2018 “Babydoll” (now playing at CHR radio) and Malcolm Todd’s two-year-old “Earrings” (not yet). At Alternative, Weezer’s “Go Away” has become an instant hit thanks to TikTok.
• TikTok’s top songs are often dominated by non-current titles as well. (This week’s leader, “Toe Tag” by Lord Len, is from 2024.) This week, eight of its top 20 are older titles, and the count in some recent weeks has been even higher.

The result is not a perfect storm for new music, but a perfect doldrums:

• Streaming alone cannot make a song a hit in the sense that we understood it for years — “even fringe listeners know and like it and research scores reflect that.” Only movie and TV syncs come close, and even then, it still took 4-6 months for “Golden” to be the radio phenomenon it was elsewhere.
• Streaming isn’t putting as much new music on the radar as we think, in part because our newly deputized citizen music directors would rather listen to Rumours again.
• Labels are bringing fewer songs to radio, particularly those not already ratified through streaming.

Radio has determined over the last year to show a little more initiative in playing songs that don’t come from streaming. Typically, those efforts have been on behalf of making sure that major artists can still go 2-3 songs deep on a current project — Benson Boone, Doja Cat, and currently Taylor Swift. But there’s also a push underway on behalf of Onerepublic’s “Need Your Love.”  

There’s also the unusual phenomenon in recent weeks of a No. 1 CHR radio hit that you can’t stream, even if you want to. The remix of Justin Bieber’s “Yukon” is the version that radio is playing, but it’s not the one you can stream (the original is not in the Spotify Top 200). The national callout I’ve seen suggests that “Yukon” hasn’t been ratified by testing either, but that results I’ve seen are for the original version.

The pop music pipeline could start flowing again if labels were willing to do what they do for streaming — provide it with an ongoing low-risk supply of new music. Labels used to be accused of “throwing music against the wall” at radio; that strategy has cheerfully emigrated to TikTok and streaming. It might seem audacious to suggest that a label release a song with a specific mission of living for seven weeks and peaking at No. 24, but every week scores of songs are released that will expire after a few days. 

As a programmer, I haven’t eliminated doubling down on new music as an option for stations here. The surprise success of some Triple-A stations still indicates an appetite for new music, even in the age group that should be happiest to make do with Classic Rock. So does the recent success of Country WKDF Nashville, although that will be harder to track now with owner Cumulus no longer in the ratings. I often felt that 2Day could have gone further than they did in bringing new music advocacy to life on the air. I still have thoughts on what “today” might sound like for a North American radio station.

In April, at least, it’s still possible to imagine the summer music that might be a springboard for renewed excitement. In April 1977, we had both “Dreams” and “Hotel California” climbing the charts, and other enduring hits (“Carry On Wayward Son,” “Dancing Queen”) on the way down. It’s no fun to imagine what radio would have been like if listeners had been happy to just keep playing “My Blue Heaven” by Gene Austin, the No. 1 song of 1927.