How to ‘Play the Bleeping Hits’

It is one of the stories most told among programmers. As a programming meeting in the conference room drones on, consultant Steve Rivers snaps everybody back to attention with one directive: “Just play the f**ing hits.”

Consultant Guy Zapoleon remembers it happening at the presentation of a perceptual study for Top 40 WKQI (Channel 95-5) Detroit. When Zapoleon posted that story on Facebook this week, consultant Jim Lawson of Collective Heads recalled hearing it in a conference room in Denver around the same time. If you spent any time with Rivers, you heard it somewhere.

I hear the Rivers story from programmer friends and clients at least several times a year. It’s always intended as a mic drop. An industry person once commented to me that “just play the hits” seems kind of basic to be regarded as one of the industry’s great truths, but Zapoleon says that its simplicity is the point.

Zapoleon and then-fellow-iHeart Media programmer John Ivey would invoke “play the hits” whenever they felt a programmer was too aggressive with music. But Zapoleon also told the story last week in a thread about Top 40’s resistance to “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley. In that case, he says, radio failed to “just play the hits” as well.

“Play the hits” has always been eternal wisdom among music programmers. One commenter learned it from veteran GM/PD Chuck Dunaway (as “play the damn hits”). I remember Elroy Smith using “we play the hits” on WGCI Chicago in the early ‘90s, then unusual for an Urban station, to make a similar statement. That it has become associated with Rivers is a function of the affection that peers and proteges feel for the late programmer. Also, perhaps because of the intensifier he added to the phrase.

At the time of the WKQI discussion, “play the hits” was more actionable than it is now. If callout research was your arbiter of the hits, songs still usually reached the point where programmers could get a fair read before the top 10. If a song lingered forever in power, it was a remarkable outlier, as opposed to just another eight-month-old record ensconced at the top because nothing newer had gained traction.

In 2026, choosing to “just play the hits” is not simplicity itself.  More than five years after COVID, it’s clear that just playing a callout ranker now dominated by recurrents has not helped CHR radio. (Hot AC, maybe. In Miami,  WFLC [Hits 97.3] has done well with a heavy diet of throwbacks and recurrents, but CHR rival WHYI [Y100] tried a similar approach for several years before segueing back to a more current posture recently.)

There is, at this moment, no other single arbiter of the hits either:

The CHR airplay chart, once reliable until at least No. 12 or 13 or so, now shows the impact of overnight spins and other hype even before the top 10.

Some programmers now believe in streaming as the barometer, but if you believe that only a streaming hit can be legitimate, you’ll miss a callout-driven title like “Mr. Know It All” by Teddy Swims, which is currently a power on WHTZ (Z100) New York, one of the format’s clearest success stories.

If you look at the streaming charts as the only arbiter of the hits, you’ll have to wonder if you’re missing “Broken Window Serenade” by Whiskey Myers or “505” by Arctic Monkeys. Then you’ll have to decide what to do with “Dreams,” “Mr. Brightside,” and “Beat It.” Some readers might believe that those songs do constitute playing the hits, but 2011’s “Broken Window Serenade” is getting only a few scattered Country spins this week. Not CHR.

Billboard’s Hot 100 hasn’t represented the shared experience of CHR hit music for two decades. A top-five hit can be “Dracula” by Tame Impala but can also be “Been by Now” by Morgan Wallen or “Solar Eclipse” by Drake & Don Toliver. Meanwhile, a song such as Dominic Fike’s “Babydoll,” generally agreed to be both a legitimate radio and streaming hit, is only hitting the top 10 now, having already been an airplay No. 1. 

Besides callout, the only place where a station’s own listeners directly tell them what the hits are is the request line. I’ve found Liveline’s weekly request tally useful, particularly in knowing which streaming hits are worth paying attention to. But programmers have always found requests inconsistent, something which gave birth to callout research in the first place. And almost no individual station can generate or answer enough calls to tally.

That means even programmers inclined to “just play the f**ing hits” cannot avoid using their own judgment about what those are, and whether there is ever a reason to help songs along until they become hits. During its chart run, “House Tour” by Sabrina Carpenter looked like a midpack song getting some discretionary love from programmers because it offered tempo from a core artist. Then it became a power at WXKS (Kiss 108) Boston.

It is notable that some of the programmers who quote Rivers about playing the hits are among those known for picking the hits as well. Zapoleon’s enterprise is well-documented and goes well beyond “Red Red Wine.” But between them, some of the other programmers who quote Rivers are responsible for breaking “Maggie May,” “Brick House,” and “Just Dance” when those songs were a B-side, an LP cut, and a Canadian hit respectively. 

I don’t see this as in any way contradictory. I remember Rivers using “secret weapon” songs extensively at WZOU Boston, during the moment when it most threatened Kiss 108. In Zapoleon’s thread, veteran PD-turned-A&R-executive Keith Naftaly remembers how Rivers trusted him to find the new hits at KMEL San Francisco, because he also knew that Naftaly would “pound” the proven hits to make the new songs work.

When WKQI rebounded, it was under then-PD Dom Theodore. In the mid-’00s, Theodore had one of the tightest lists in CHR radio, in terms of number of titles. But playing the hits for Detroit meant that such songs as Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer” and C-Side & Keyshia Cole’s “Boyfriend/Girlfriend” were among KQI’s top 10 songs of 2008. Callout might have confirmed those songs, but they wouldn’t have gotten there without somebody’s acumen.

For his part, Zapoleon’s hierarchy (and his acid test for power rotation) is still to put callout first. That’s followed by airplay, streams, and Shazam. He looks for a song to be top-30 streaming, but might make an exception for top-20 airplay. That usually works out to no more than one suggested add a week and often less. The most recent was Adela’s “Nicole Kidman.” Before that, it was the first-week add for Taylor Swift’s “Patient Zero.” Before that, he says, “you have to go back to August 29 for ‘Boston’ and ‘Loser.’”

Z100 had two adds this week — Tate McRae’s “Housewife” and Olivia Rodrigo & Chappell Roan’s “Expectations.” Both of those have the combo of tempo, major artists, and instant streaming stories that make them an easy call. But Z100 is also supporting Harry Styles’s “Coming Up Roses,” a core act whose “Dance No More” the station was willing to help break from whole cloth until the former became a single.

Over the years, the industry has usually meant “play the hits” as meaning “clear the decks.” As Zapoleon’s championing of “Choosin’ Texas” suggests, these days it may mean finding songs and not just eliminating bad ones. It might mean acknowledging that the tightest list is no longer always the silver bullet, especially in a world where non-comm Triple-A KUTX Austin, Texas, can be No. 2 in the market. Whatever “just play the hits” means now, we don’t seem to be doing it, and we don’t know exactly why.