Liveline just launched this week in market #11 on Seattle’s legendary KQMV (Movin’ 92.5). In one of Top 40’s fiercest battles, KQMV dominates. We’ve listened to and followed it for years in terms of their great programming, music decisions and content execution. Seattle joins a great group of new Liveline affiliates: WMEE Fort Wayne IN, WHBC-FM (Mix 94.1) Canton, Ohio, WMYB (Energy 92.1) Myrtle Beach, S.C., WGXL Lebanon N.H., KURR (Mix 103.1) St. George Utah, KZDX (Hot 100) Twin Falls, Idaho, KDAO (Rewind 93) Marshalltown, Iowa, and WBBX (Sunny 106.1) Salisbury Md. That officially brings us to 90 affiliates, with more than a third of them joining in the past year.
We’re proud of that number, but it’s so much more validating knowing that these are all stations and programmers that added it independently without a cramdown order from corporate, unlike many other shows that local PDs don’t believe in and are looking for excuses to drop. We’ve talked a lot recently about what radio can do that Spotify and TikTok can’t. Liveline is five hours of people calling, texting, requesting songs, reacting to what’s happening right now and sometimes completely changing what we planned to do that night. Because we are the only live show, our advantage is phoners making current listeners the star and not just chopped up, pre-recorded bits that are totally disconnected from the music, the station, and the moment.
This past week gave us one of the best examples yet of why being live and having control of the music matters. I was pleasantly surprised by how strongly Pop radio reacted to the death of Dolly Parton. This is an artist whose biggest records are decades removed from the format, yet stations understood that this was a huge cultural moment and broke format to acknowledge it. The only part I don’t understand is why so many stations stopped there.
After Dolly died, her music absolutely exploded. “Jolene” and “9 to 5” became the #1 and #2 songs on Spotify worldwide, while Dolly became the most-streamed artist in. Her streams jumped more than 2,000%. This wasn’t just people remembering Dolly for an afternoon. Listeners were actively discovering and remembering the music. We saw exactly the same thing on Liveline. “Jolene” and “9 to 5” were both in our Top 20 Requests last week, and the requests haven’t stopped. Most importantly, it’s young people calling for them. These aren’t 65-year-olds suddenly finding the request line. They’re the same young listeners calling us for the biggest current songs we play every night.
It reminds me so much of what just happened with Michael Jackson. His songs blew up again because of the movie in April, a new generation got excited about them, and suddenly kids who weren’t even born when those records came out were requesting them alongside today’s brand-new music. At that point, does the year printed on the record really matter? We spend an unbelievable amount of time in radio trying to figure out what listeners want. We have research, callout, streaming data, music meetings, charts and consultants. All of those things can be useful, but sometimes the audience makes the answer obvious: they call you and ask you to play thier favorite song. Not one or two oddball cases, but over and over… and over.
Dolly’s death wasn’t forgotten in two days. The streaming numbers proved it, and our phones are still proving it. So, if “Jolene” is being streamed alongside today’s biggest hits, requested alongside power records like “Dracula” and “Drop Dead” and loved by the same young audience actively listening to your station, why exactly are we deciding that it doesn’t belong because it came out before 2005? I’m not suggesting Top 40 suddenly become the Dolly Parton format and violate expectations. I’m suggesting we stop treating the rules of a format as more important than the audience. Isn’t the format simply to play the target audience’s favorite songs?
Being relevant doesn’t always require playing something new. Sometimes the most relevant song in America is 50 years old because something happened today that made millions of people care about it again. That’s the opportunity radio has to live in the moment instead of waiting for the moment to pass. The same reason stations played “Golden” because of K-POP Demon Hunters is why they should also be playing “Billie Jean” and “Jolene.”
And whether it’s Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, a song exploding because of a movie, or the next completely unexpected throwback going viral tomorrow, the philosophy should be pretty simple: If your listeners are flat-out telling you they want to hear it, why wouldn’t you listen?
