When I formulated it in 2020, what the Lost Factor sought to measure was relatively simple. We divided year-end Billboard Top 100 points from a song’s peak year by the number of measured spins it was receiving now at monitored radio stations. We calculated how big a song had been at the time, then determined whether it endured. How it started vs. how’s it going now wasn’t a meme yet, but it was a song’s trajectory I was interested in.
In the years when Billboard Hot 100 airplay was mostly Top 40, that question was mostly “how big was this song at CHR?” While there were certainly some big hits that had been diminished (“Physical”) or shunted aside (“You Light Up My Life”) over the years, the best indicator was whether a song had been big enough to reach power rotation (roughly #6-7) at the time. Otherwise, a song might not be well known enough to forget in the first place.
When Billboard went to all-format airplay, and songs began to chart on the Hot 100 without being pop hits, those songs didn’t necessarily have high “Lost Factor” numbers (typically anything above a 1.0 by our formula), because many of them were still getting airplay at their home format. It’s no surprise that “Iris” and “Baby, One More Time” are among the five most enduring songs of 1999, but so are “Write This Down” by George Strait and “How Forever Feels” by Kenny Chesney.
In its first four decades, it was Top 40 that helped create the shared experience by which songs reached beyond the ranks of current music fans, and it was having a shared experience in the first place that often determined whether a song would endure. That is, unless a TV show or a movie or a subsequent interpolation put a song back on the radar. But sometimes it could happen just because radio nurtured, say, “I Melt With You” into playability.
I’ve been thinking about both the shared experience and the endurance of songs a lot in recent weeks. The 23 weeks at No. 1 for Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” brought forward the “charts don’t mean what they used to” people. So did Taylor Swift’s four songs in the top 5 of the Hot 100 last week and the quick dispatch of three of them this week. Then there were the people who somehow managed to miss “Choosin’ Texas” until the news stories hit.
Even as “Choosin’ Texas” made chart history, there were a few Top 40 stations that wouldn’t play it, most notably WHTZ (Z100) New York, and many more that had not yet powered it. (Since then, many of the iHeart CHRs in that column have increased rotation.) When CHR was the arbiter, it was certainly significant if a song didn’t go to power in terms of its reach.
Now, however, Country’s share of national listening is higher than Top 40’s (if not CHR, Hot AC, and AC combined). With even some CHR support, “Texas” became a juggernaut in a way that a big pop-only hit such as, say, Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun” could not. If you didn’t know it, it probably wasn’t because you were a regular contemporary music listener and didn’t hear it enough on Z100, it was more likely an indicator that you had self-selected yourself out of knowing about today’s hits.
It’s true that topping the Hot 100 doesn’t guarantee the shared musical experience that it once did. That’s no longer what it purports to measure. But “Choosin’ Texas” was a multi-format hit with 2.2 billion exposures. Wherever you may land generationally on the discussion of Elvis and the Beatles vs. Glee and Drake, in terms of meaningful chart statistics, “Choosin’ Texas” cannot be diminished just because the Hot 100 prompts so many other “get off my lawn” moments.
But thinking about the shared experience also got me wondering about the endurance of today’s hits and what the “Lost Factor” will look like going forward. Since Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997,” then the American Idol souvenir singles, there have been plenty of event records that didn’t depend on a typical radio trajectory. Then we started getting Hot 100 chart-toppers that weren’t even events.
If you look at some of Billboard’s Top 100 songs of 2024, there are non-pop radio hits that were essentially born lost, with Lost Factor scores already over 1.0, based on Mediabase all-format airplay over the last seven days:
- Drake, “IDGAF,” 18.0
- Yé, “Carnival,” 5.72
- Future, “Type S**t,” 1.47
Among some prominent titles that did flirt with multi-format radio, including CHR, Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” has a 2.37. Zach Bryan’s “Pink Skies” has a 1.29. Bryan & Kacey Musgrave’s “I Remember Everything” does still generate enough airplay to come in at 0.87. “Choosin’ Texas” and “Pink Skies” had two different core audiences, but I expect that many of the “never heard Ella” people have never heard “Pink Skies” either.
That some of the chart quirks and quarks of 2024 are so distant already does reflect how many big hits we saw that year. There were still very much shared experience hits with negligible Lost Factors well below 0.9:
- Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” 0.013
- Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso,” 0.0145
- Benson Boone, “Beautiful Things,” 0.0146
- Teddy Swims, “Lose Control,” 0.016
- Post Malone & Morgan Wallen, “I Had Some Help,” 0.07
Morgan Wallen & Ernest’s “Cowgirls,” a good example of a Country hit that didn’t get traction at CHR, still had an 0.06, based on its Country airplay.
For that reason, it’s easy to predict the near future for “Choosin’ Texas.” Some CHR stations won’t send a Country title to recurrent or the gold library. Other pop stations, particularly Hot and Mainstream ACs that resisted it as a current, will likely embrace it as a gold title. In any case, as the likely No. 1 Billboard song of 2026, “Texas” will need to only get 100 spins a week to stay out of the “lost” zone. Morgan Wallen’s “Love Somebody,” a CHR mid-charter, still gets that from CHR alone (and a total of 1,862 spins last week.)
When we took our initial look at the “Lost Factor,” more than six years ago, it was often the pop music immediately before the MTV era and CHR rebound that had most disappeared, from such artists as Sheena Easton, Olivia Newton-John, Barbra Streisand, and others.
The “lost” songs of that era included some female Country/Top 40 crossovers, such as Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” which just landed in “lost” with a 1.08 LF. (Parton’s Kenny Rogers duet, “Islands in the Stream,” the last major crossover hit of its era, was not lost with a 0.17 LF.) After Parton’s passing, both songs are now receiving more than proportionate airplay to their hit status at the time — 0.16 for “Islands”; 0.24 for “9 to 5.”
