Mason Kelter is on vacation this week. These are guest observations from Ross on Radio author/editor Sean Ross.
Two years ago, during a moment of early summer optimism for CHR radio and pop music, the streaming hits, radio hits, and requests to the syndicated evening show Liveline were, momentarily, in alignment. Hits such as “Not Like Us” or “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” might have started at streaming, but they also worked as radio hits and radiated out quickly.
So, it’s interesting now to see that Liveline’s top 20 requests over the past few weeks have been composed of:
- Songs that radio and streaming can agree on (“Drop Dead,” “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” “Stateside,” “Die on This Hill, “I Knew It, I Knew You,” “Dracula”) but also …
- Lots of the left-field hits, new and reissued, that emanate from streaming and dare radio to come aboard (“Babydoll,” “Earrings,” “ILoveItILoveItILoveIt,” “Freakin’ Out.” “Rein Me In”).
- The cuts that have been emerging from the new Olivia Rodrigo album faster than radio’s ability to acknowledge them, with “Drop Dead” joined by “The Cure” and “Stupid Song.”
- The vintage titles that have resurfaced, particularly in the absence of enough new hits. (“Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Beauty and a Beat,” “Lush Life,” “The One That Got Away”).
Some songs, like “Rein Me In” and “Freakin’ Out,” generate requests before getting their first Liveline spin. Then there’s Michael Jackson’s “Chicago,” the 12-year-old posthumously released song now driven by a combination of TikTok usage, streaming, and renewed interest in Jackson overall. That one was the No. 19 request for Liveline last week without any radio spins anywhere.
How to acknowledge streaming has been an ongoing issue in Ross on Radio and in every music meeting, not just for pop programmers but in Country and R&B as well. The songs sent to us from streaming are often rando records, not radio records. Their audience is dismissed as the one we can’t reach anyway. Liveline’s requests are evidence to the contrary. Even a few spins on some of those outliers is leading callers to expect to hear those songs on the radio.
The requests also reinforce the notion of Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits and its other DSP equivalents, along with SiriusXM Hits 1, as “the other CHR” in your market. I had stopped thinking of them that way for a while. Now. they are setting the agenda in part because CHR radio often chooses not to, joining ranks only occasionally on behalf of an “Elizabeth Taylor” or “Silent Treatment” or “American Girls.” Maybe it takes callout respondents eight months to catch up with “Dracula” or “Die on This Hill.” It’s encouraging to know that there are still CHR and Hot AC listeners who move faster.
Today’s Top Hits is far from a perfect music director for CHR radio. That’s not its job, although it is less random than TikTok. Increasingly, it relies heavily on bringbacks and songs that linger forever as well, although it has 50 slots to fill, not radio’s 15-22 current slots. It needs to be augmented by radio at the rate of more than a song or two per quarter. I still believe in radio’s ability to drive streaming’s agenda, but we’re not really trying now.
Here’s a Fresh Listen to Today’s Top Hits — an hour’s worth of music on shuffle on June 29. Setting aside the throwbacks that have filled (and perhaps widened) the void at pop radio, it looks a lot like CHR, except for a stretch where it dramatically does not:
- Taylor Swift, “I Knew It, I Knew You”
- Justin Bieber, “Daisies”
- PinkPantheress f/ Zara Larsson, “Stateside”
- Shakira & Burna Boy, “Dai Dai”
- Le Sserafim, Illit, & Katseye, “Iconic by Mistake”
- Stella Lefty, “Boston”
- Huntr/X, “Golden”
- Olivia Dean, “So Easy (To Fall in Love)”
- Raye, “Where Is My Husband!”
- Sienna Spiro, “Die on this Hill”
- Don Tolliver, “E85”
- Tame Impala & Jennie, “Dracula”
Today’s Top Hits is far from a perfect music director for CHR radio. That’s not its job, although it is less random than TikTok. Increasingly, it relies heavily on bringbacks and songs that linger forever as well, although it has 50 slots to fill, not radio’s 15-22 current slots. It needs to be augmented by radio at the rate of more than a song or two per quarter. I still believe in radio’s ability to drive streaming’s agenda, but we’re not really trying now.
Plus, the old matter, even if there are exceptions to it: radio won’t play anything unless labels are explicitly promoting towards it.
Which brings me to a concept I’d like to call my own: reactive curation. There, I said it. If linear radio still wants to catch the remaining Alpha generation (forget about zoomers at this point), it will have to adapt to their way of listening to music. Which is to say that not only will it have to play the consistent favorites until they eventually burn out on them, but also the quick burning novelties. If those novelties are brand new music or bringbacks, it doesn’t matter. The same way playlist culture has made music more genre-neutral/fluid, the last few years have also shown a sort of era-neutrality/fluidity to it. To them, any music is “their” music, as long as it’s new to them.