January 2, 2010

1. Iyaz, “Replay”
2. Ke$ha, “Tik Tok”
3. Owl City, “Fireflies”
4. Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”
5. Jason Derulo, “Whatcha Say”

The turn of the decade is supposed to be a doldrum in pop music, and a downturn in the fortunes of Top 40. That pattern holds up, more or less, in most of the ’00 years we’ve been looking at since 1960, but the cycles theory is severely challenged by pop music in 2010.

Pop music is awash in party-rock anthems, but still varied — below the top five are Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Kings of Leon, Kelly Clarkson, Jay-Z, David Guetta, Rihanna, Onerepublic, and Black Eyed Peas. Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus are both represented — although Bieber is a few years from true pop acceptance. American Idol still matters: Both Adam Lambert and Kris Allen have chart songs.

Top 40 radio is on its biggest building boom of the last 15 years. Arbitron’s PPM metered ratings methodology is being deployed and cume-driven formats are thriving: A format with a mother/daughter coalition like CHR that can be detected by multiple meters in a household is particularly advantaged. For a decade, Top 40 has been largely the province of Clear Channel/iHeart Media. Now both CBS and Cumulus are rapidly deploying second and third CHRs in top 50 markets.

Pandora’s explosion has already started, the release of its iPhone app making it the first serious online-only radio contender. But parents are enjoying sharing music with their kids again, and continuing to model radio usage for them. (And yet, music breaking online is now a decade old phenomenon and Owl City is the latest example.) Parents are probably also in a good mood because America isn’t experiencing a second Great Depression — although pop music’s comeback was in process well before the downturn of 2008-09.

If you were looking for musical signs of trouble in January 2010, perhaps you could look at two co-produced hits in the top five — “Replay” and “Whatcha Say.” Other producers will go far further with this formula than J.R. Rotem, but those songs herald pop music becoming more ethereal and less energetic over the next decade. Imogen Heap was Jason DeRulo’s inspired sample choice. Soon she was Taylor Swift’s collaborator and chilled out pop was in “Style.” (“Replay” was also proof that lyrical repetition—the cheesy, delicious secret weapon in an uptempo song—could be far more unbearable with less tempo.)

The Top 40s that launched in 2009-10 often positioned themselves between Mainstream and Rhythmic — that was a narrow place to begin with. Much of the rhythmic pop that became their center lane sound was music not shared with R&B radio, a precedent established by iHeart’s Kiss-FM stations of a decade earlier. As with the ratings dominance and chart influence of those stations in 2000, the format wars tended to make CHR music narrower, as incumbent stations resolved not to be out-jammed by their new rivals.

Rock had experienced a relatively healthy representation at pop radio in the ‘00s, because of pop/punk. By 2010, that genre was starting to be affected by dance/pop — Cobra Starship, 3Oh!3. For its own part, dance/pop was taking on a more aggressive EDM flavor. What began with “Boom Boom Pow” the year before was becoming what this column dubbed “turbo-pop” and becoming busier and less melodic. In a few years, the frothiness of “Tik Tok” would give way to the joylessness of Ke$ha’s “Blow.” By then, EDM’s superstar DJs were often the lead artists, rather than merely the superstars’ producers.

The end of the late ‘00s/early ‘10s boom was neither on schedule—ending usually about the time in the decade when the good times began—or particularly symmetrical. There were the usual articles about the cycles theory, but I remember thinking that rather than the format peak being consumed in extremes, followed by a reactionary period that led to a doldrums, what we had was an extreme doldrums—more aggressive EDM pop, but also piano ballads and the brief period of Lumineers folksiness. Certainly, the music of the late ‘10s—slow but sludgy and noisy—can be described as “extreme doldrums.”

February 10, 2020

1. Post Malone, “Circles”
2. Maroon 5, “Memories”
3. Dua Lipa, “Don’t Stop Now”
4. Selena Gomez, “Lose You to Love Me”
5. Arizona Zervas, “Roxanne”

By mid-2019, pop music was again inspiring optimism, partially because it had reached a place of such unlistenability over the previous few years that the only way left was up. Toward the end of the year, I actually had a medium-market PD tell me he was out of slots for new music, mind-boggling because CHR had tightened to about 15 true currents in many places due to a surfeit of product. But that was speeding up again — in part because labels were willing to work more than one song at a time from certain artists, and because streaming services had so sped up the music discovery process that it simply didn’t make sense to wait five months to decide if a song was a hit.

Whether we are escaping the doldrums or mired in them will take a while to play out, of course. Post Malone may feel a little more up-tempo thanks to “Circles,” but Arizona Zervas is waiting to romance-the-drone in his place. Billie Eilish and Tones and I are creating pop records that are cool to younger listeners, but not yet entirely acceptable to their parents; they may as well still be Roddy Ricch. And teens are hardly thinking out of “The Box” yet.

One thing that became clear to me when looking at “Music on the ‘00s” is the extent to which radio’s internal issues impact the musical landscape. Radio’s internal issues now are being filtered through streaming. Going forward, they will also certainly be shaped by iHeart’s announced intention to rely more heavily on data mining. iHR is promising more local differentiation as a result. Will that be offset by fewer decision makers? There aren’t that many program and music directors practicing music enterprise now.

The cycles theory is seen as a referendum on available product, but how radio reacts has always determined what music is made available. The question now is whether it’s radio or streaming that will shape what the labels offer. After five decades, programmers decided not to participate in a format downturn in 2010, at least for a few years. Now is that their decision to make?

I hope you’ve enjoyed the “Music on the ‘00s” series. Be sure to check out our earlier articles on:

• 1960 and 1970
• 1980
• 1990
• 2000