Fresh Listen: KHTT (K-Hits 106.9) Tulsa

It has happened gradually in recent months, but there’s encouraging news for CHR in what’s happening on Griffin Media’s KHTT (K-Hits 106.9) Tulsa, Okla.

PD Chris Ryan arrived in January from WXLK (K92) Roanoke, Va. This month, K-Hits is up 5.2-5.8 12-plus, making it Nielsen’s top published station in the market. In Eastlan, K-Hits is fifth, but up 6.1-6.6 since April, and still healthier than many comparable stations.

Part of what has intrigued me about K-Hits in recent weeks has been its powers, which play around 95x a week. For the last seven days those were:

• Taylor Swift, “I Knew It, I Knew You”
• Ariana Grande, “Hate That I Made You Love Me”
• Malcolm Todd, “Earrings”
• Dominic Fike, “Babydoll”
• Olivia Rodrigo, “Drop Dead”

KHTT’s powers differ from much of the often-glacial Top 40 format in two significant ways. For one, K-Hits is powering “Earrings” and “Babydoll,” two streaming crossovers that CHR hasn’t quite known what to do with. “Babydoll” is also power on iHeart rival CHR KTBT (The Beat), which has a 2.2 in Nielsen and a 4.3 in Eastlan.

Also, of those five songs, only Rodrigo has already peaked on Mediabase’s CHR airplay chart. Some songs that are still powers elsewhere—“Dracula” and “Choosin’ Texas”—have moved to the next tier down, still amply exposed at just above 60x. Bruno Mars’ “I Just Might,” still a power for other CHRs, is playing less than 10x a week.

Ryan uses a mix of streaming and local on-line callout through Hey Rate This. This week, there will be a song bouncing back into power, but it’s The Kid Laroi’s “Girls,” a bigger hit in its second run for K-Hits than elsewhere. He’s also paying attention to gold titles with streaming stories, such as “Sk8er Boi” by Avril Lavigne or “Me & U” by Cassie.

Beyond the ability to play the hits sooner, listening to even an hour of K-Hits gives you the feeling that things are happening between the songs. Here’s what I heard at 3 p.m. Tuesday, September 8:

• The hour began with a Top 3 at 3 countdown;
• There were sweepers soliciting text requests. The first sweeper played, followed by a song, then p.m. driver Austin came back and announced the next song as an instant request.
• There were two morning promos for the Chubbs Show, one of which set a 7:40 appointment not for a contest or a benchmark, but “what happened to me at the restaurant”;
• There were tickets to see Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias—a teaser, a call-to-win solicit, and a payoff staged as “another local winner”; 
• There were also promos for the station co-sponsored upcoming pet expo, leading Austin to note that they had both “Fluffy” and “Woof” this hour;
• There was another contest teaser to see Kehlani in Oklahoma City;
• There were promos for the station’s merch store, K-Fits;

There were also the off-kilter sweepers that Ryan used at K92, a mix of listener lifestyle and observational comedy. “Sad girl summer has ended,” declares one female-voiced piece. “The ex is blocked, the candle is lit, and the decorative pumpkins have been deployed. I’m officially sat!”

When the :00 ID came at 4:00, it was a sweeper/donut/jingle sort combo of the sort that was once common in the CHR: the station sig. The studio sponsorship was the Tulsa Oilers. The station was “Oklahoma’s Own…” Austin did a three-artist teaser into the jingle.

I didn’t have a word for it before Tuesday, but hearing K-Hits helped me realize that a lot of CHR is distressing now because it’s “under-programmed.”. That doesn’t mean that K-Hits is in any way too busy. It just does a lot of the things that radio used to do, although I thought “K-Fits,” sponsored by a local printer, was especially clever.

Musically, here’s K-Hits at 3 p.m., starting with the top 3 at 3:

• Sam Fender & Olivia Dean, “Rein Me In”—The UK’s longest-running No.1 is still playing 39x a week (#3)
• Dominic Fike, “Babydoll” (#2)
• Stella Lefty, “Boston” (#1)
• Swedish House Mafia, “Don’t You Worry Child”
• Sombr, “Homewrecker”
• Tame Impala & Jennie, “Dracula”
• Malcolm Todd, “Earrings”
• Adele, “Rolling In the Deep”—the instant text request song
• Pinkpantheress f/Zara Larsson, “Stateside”
• Olivia Rodrigo, “Drop Dead”
• Jack Harlow, “First Class”
• Temper City, “Self Aware”—with a “press play on what’s next” sweeper
• Zara Larsson, “Midnight Sun”
• Dexter & Moonrocks, “Freakin’ Out”—with an artist sweeper
• Killers, “Mr. Brightside”
• Ella Langley, “Be Her”