Has the success of Ella Langley at Country radio and beyond shattered one of that format’s last hangups about female artists, the reluctance to schedule their songs back-to-back? Not entirely, judging from an analysis of Langley’s airplay at the format this week.
Langley’s duet with Morgan Wallen, “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” is No. 3 at Country radio after a fast-tracked 12 weeks. It follows the phenomenal success of “Choosin’ Texas” and “Be Here,” both of which have moved to Mediabase’s recurrent listing but would still be top 15 songs. A few stations, such as WUBE (B105) Cincinnati, have all three songs among their top five most-played.
When Langley plays on Country radio, however, it’s still rare that she is followed by another female artist. Ross on Radio analyzed the 6am-midnight airplay of 67 Mediabase PPM chart reporters on July 13. On most of those stations, some Langley title played somewhere between 18-26 times a day. But the average number of times that she was followed by another female artist was only 1.5. That includes 19 reporters where it didn’t happen at all.
The PPM markets were chosen as the ones where individual song decisions are most heavily scrutinized. For the most part, only consecutive songs were counted, not instances where Langley was separated from another artist by a 5-7-minute stopset. (I did allow one instance where the commercial break was 90 seconds.)
Part of the reason for focusing on the back-to-back issue was because, unlike the fluctuations in current product, it’s one where programmers can’t point to the availability of hits, but instead have made conscious decisions, whether it’s in setting rules for the scheduler or in editing a subsequent music log. The back-to-back question has always been a significant part of the discussion over the last decade.
Our segue count includes duets — not just Langley & Wallen, but also current titles by Lauren Alaina & Chase Matthew, Lainey Wilson & John Mayer, Langley’s previous duet with Riley Green, and even the Koe Wetzel/Jessie Murph “High Road” — as well as groups with male/female leads. The idea was to give radio the benefit of the doubt, but if “I Can’t Love You Anymore” into “Are You Gonna Kiss Me or Not” doesn’t count for you, then the number is even lower.
Focusing on Langley alone, and one day’s airplay, is a decidedly anecdotal way to look at how programmers are scheduling music overall. By the author’s own forthright admission:
- It is certainly possible that other female-to-female segues took place on those stations, and I did not scrutinize 67 logs for those other possible examples.
- I did encounter stations that had back-to-back female titles on July 13 but not on the previous Friday (10). That was probably true in reverse as well. I’m not assuming that any of the 19 stations had a conscious prohibition on female segues.
I also didn’t look at daily station logs from a year or decade ago. While 1.5 segues a day is not a large number, seeing those segues happen at all at three-fourths of the format likely does represent a move forward from what some PDs once considered an unbreakable rule.
The station with the most segues between Langley and other female artists on Monday was KKWF (The Wolf) Seattle, where it happened six times counting duets, followed by KMLE Phoenix and WNCB (B93.9) Raleigh, N.C., on five occasions.
There were a handful of stations where female artists, including Langley, actually played back-to-back-to-back, including WFMS Indianapolis and WGH (Eagle 97.3) Norfolk, Va. There was one instance, on a syndicated evening show, of four female titles in succession, including two Langley songs. There were also a few instances of Langley double-plays.
How PDs scheduled Langley didn’t necessarily preclude them from supporting her or female artists in other ways. A few stations had no Langley/female segues but did allow her to play at 15-20-minute intervals, as they would Morgan Wallen. Some stations had three or four female artists in their top 5 but didn’t have back-to-back Langley/female segues.
A year ago, when ROR spot-checked power rotation on about a dozen stations, only about a third had a female act in power. This year, we measured something slightly different, looking at the top 5 of all PPM stations. Top 5 doesn’t align perfectly with power rotation, of course, which can be anywhere from two songs to six or seven these days. But only four stations had no females, again including duets, in the top five this year.
By contrast, 11 stations had either three or four top 5 songs by female artists, drawing from some combination of Langley, Megan Moroney, or Stella Lefty. Even Kacey Musgraves is in the top 5 (at KYGO Denver, where her duet appearance on “I Remember Everything” was a power a year ago).
In a recent Country Insider article on the improved standing of female artists at Country, programmers and industry observers were agreed that the real answer will be long-term. That depends on a consistent stream of new artists who find new slots, rather than cannibalizing existing ones. There’s no mic drop yet.
A less discussed aspect of Country and female artists is their place in a station’s gold library. That has become a self-fulfilling prophecy when there are fewer songs that might go to recurrent and gold in the first place. That is, in turn, affected by whether a female act takes 20 weeks or 46 weeks to go to No. 1.
But it also depends on whether female artists find a place in a station’s gold library, something harder to do when they have fewer hits to start with. Of those Langley segues to other female artists, roughly half were to currents, and half were to library titles. There are two noteworthy developments here. One is that Country has in recent years become friendlier to a late ’90s/early ’00s era marked by female stardom; Langley’s segues included Shania Twain and Jo Dee Messina, as well as Gretchen Wilson and Carrie Underwood.
The other good news is that Langley herself is now on the 20 week fast-track reserved for only a handful of artists. By having three hits in eight months, with a fourth in “Loving Life Again” breaking quickly, Langley isn’t just changing female representation now, she’s increasing the chance of station logs looking different in a year, if stations’ music-scheduling rules don’t preclude it.
Are you kidding me? In 2026 we’re still having that argument about back to back female artists? That is so 70’s radio. Stylistic variety is important in any format. But so many mainstream male artists sound so similar. Does anyone say we shouldn’t play two male artists back to back? smh
This has nothing to do with the artists being female- there have been many superstar female artists in my 30 years in country radio which I proudly play and enjoy. It is about balancing the sounds throughout the hour. I don’t play ballads back-to-back. I try not to play non-mainstream sounding songs back-to-back. I try not to play a Morgan Wallen next to a Bailey Zimmerman, Jelly Roll or other similar sounding rock-edged voices back-to-back (though with the abundance of those artists in current and recurrent categories today, it is harder to do). I would try and not play a Dan+Shay (or, back in the day, Rascal Flatts) adjacent to a female artist due to the similar vocal sounds- I would try to disperse them evenly throughout the music sweep or hour where I could within the constrains of category placement, artist separation, and other rules I personally follow when scheduling. It doesn’t always happen; there are times where an abundance of female artists in an hour (especially if they are in current categories) necessitates back-to-back female songs, but it has nothing to do with the sex of the artist. We are blessed to currently have emerging superstar female artists right now which makes it much easier to spread their sound throughout each hour to balance the sound and variety listeners enjoy. It has nothing to do with sexism as many media outlets like to report.