When Rhythmic Top 40 and Hip-Hop/R&B were the leading formats in 2018—in terms of the number of individual titles cracking the top twenty—it confirmed what your kids probably already knew, sitting in the back seat and listening through headphones. Streaming stories had given Hip-Hop stations a torrent of available product and reduced Mainstream Top 40 and other pop-driven formats to a relative trickle.

In 2019, the latest data from Nielsen BDSRadio shows that Rhythmic Top 40 remains the most aggressive radio format in terms of current product. Pop formats—Mainstream Top 40, Adult Top 40, and even Mainstream AC—were all up slightly after years of noticeable decline. The most noticeable change was at Country, which had almost twenty fewer chart hits in 2019 than it had six years earlier, when we first asked this question.

Nielsen BDSRadio’s Tally of Top 20 Songs By Format

As always, many radio programmers would disavow any correlation between the number of hits at a format and its strength—some see it as the opposite of “playing the hits.” But the availability of consensus hits is often cited anecdotally as reflecting the current strength of a format. And there is certainly no sign that the greater conservatism of Country or Alternative has yet paid off.

Here’s how the new music landscape looks on a format-by-format basis. (And here’s what we wrote last year.)

Rhythmic Top 40: The No. 1 song is a streaming phenomenon–Arizona Verzas’ “Roxanne.” The No. 2 song is a streaming phenomenon, and Roddy Ricch is not only in “The Box” as a solo act, but at No. 6 via a collaboration. There’s less of a stylistic variance at the top of the charts than at this time last year—the biggest Latin Hip-Hop record at the format this week is the Black Eyed Peas/J Balvin collaboration—but there’s also enough hot product that it’s not currently an issue.

Triple-A broke one song less than it did last year, but moves into the No. 2 position. The format still has a large number of piles to choose from—retro soul, singer/songwriter, blues rock, alternative veterans and the softer side of the current format. The format still isn’t sending a lot of music to pop radio—the furthest any of this week’s top 10 hits have gotten is Coldplay’s top 30 Hot AC “Orphans”—but it was an early part of the multi-format story on Maren Morris’ “The Bones.”

Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop is propelled by a new group of hitmakers and particularly its “Baby” boom (Lil Baby and DaBaby). Last year, the format was essentially tied with Rhythmic Top 40 in terms of top 20 hits. This year, Rhythmic opens up a ten song lead again, and the Hip-Hop/R&B format is third, but still with more new music than any mainstream pop format.

Mainstream Top 40 saw a sharp decline in consensus hits between 2013 and 2018 and the sort of slow-down where airplay lagged ludicrously behind streaming. As summer loomed, it felt like Top 40’s available product was improving, driven by program directors’ seeming willingness to latch on to streaming stories faster and especially to play more than one song at a time by key artists. In 2019, that resulted in a small net gain. The story will be most apparent in 2020.

Active Rock’s charts are led this week by several of its marquee artists of the last fifteen years—Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, Theory of a Deadman, Volbeat, Disturbed—and a defining artist of the last forty years in Ozzy Osborne. But the story for the last year is an increasing number of acts that were either from Alternative (Green Day, Black Keys), Zeppelin-inspired (not just Greta Van Fleet but Ed Sheeran), branching out sonically (Highly Suspect), or hard to categorize (Glorious Sons, the Hu).

Adult Top 40 also experienced a slight uptick in product, despite concerns in previous years that Mainstream Top 40 was sending along less suitable music. At this moment, there’s more to choose from than EDM ballads—Maroon 5, Lewis Capaldi, Dan + Shay. There are also pop songs that seem to work better for Adult Top 40 than Mainstream—Taylor Swift’s “You Need To Calm Down”; the Maren Morris hit—confirming in the process that there is still an appetite for pop.

Alternative was essentially flat for new consensus hits after a sharply down period in the mid-‘10s, although it still trails Triple-A by nearly 20 songs. Last year, five of its top ten songs were shared with Mainstream CHR. This year, it’s two out of ten, but one of those is Billie Eilish, who PDs seem to be accepting more enthusiastically after several years. (Further down, there’s the reverse crossover of Post Malone’s “Circles.”)

Contemporary Christian is being tracked here for the first time. Once considered to be at least as conservative as Mainstream AC, the format has become heavily based in 2010s titles in recent years. That is in part due to the rise of praise-and-worship music, but also because of an infusion of more pop sounding acts in a format that had a heavily “Modern AC” feel over the years.

Country found almost twenty fewer top 20 hits than it did in 2013, considered a peak year for the format in terms of ratings, available product, and all-ages appeal. As program directors continue to parse the future of the format, it’s interesting to note that the last three hits have vacillated between the pop and traditional camps—Dan + Shay & Justin Bieber’s “10,000 Hours”; Jon Pardi’s “Heartache Medication”; and Maren Morris’ “The Bones,” two of them with substantial pop airplay. 

Urban AC had its highest number of top 20 hits in our six years of measurement, even though a few prominent stations have either sharply slowed down what they consider “current” or are playing fewer currents overall. There’s less representation for ‘80s and early ‘90s acts in the format with each year, although there is a fast-breaking Charlie Wilson single in the top 10.

Mainstream AC is the third of our pop formats to nudge forward in terms of top 20 hits this year, although it’s still last among the formats measured here. As with Adult Top 40, Mainstream Top 40 was able to send along more suitable titles (Jonas Brothers, Lewis Capaldi, Maroon 5, Dan + Shay), plus some songs that AC was willing to embrace, even if they didn’t go power (Kygo x Whitney Houston, Pink, “Walk Me Home”).

Thanks to Adam Foster of Nielsen BDSRadio for all his help in supplying the data.