Why do hit songs become “lost” — songs you heard a lot at the time, but songs you don’t hear on broadcast radio now? It usually starts with radio stations asking listeners what they like. Often, the passage of time has claimed songs that people wanted to hear just a few years ago, but occasionally because not enough time has passed. Sometimes, those songs weren’t all that big in the first place. And even when music lovers wish that radio would go deeper, they can’t work up too much righteous indignation over not hearing some of the songs that did disappear from the airwaves.

Recently, I calculated a “lost factor” for the biggest chart hits of the 1980s, assigning them points based on their placement on Billboard’s year-end top 100, and the amount of spins they receive now in the U.S. and Canada. The resulting 100 Most Lost Songs of the ‘80s and other articles accompanying it were enthusiastically received. I wrote a column anticipating likely questions about methodology, but I realize there are a lot of questions that weren’t answered about why radio abandons some hits in the first place. The most flags were raised on behalf of Daryl Hall & John Oates. Many readers were surprised by how heavily represented the consistent ‘80s hitmakers were in the land-of-the-lost. But the duo tick a number of different boxes, beginning, ironically, with being such consistent hitmakers. For starters …

Why Would Everything Endure Equally? Hit songs aren’t symmetrical in their appeal at the time — some superstar titles spend 18 weeks on the charts, but spend most of that time in the top 5 and in power rotation at radio; some songs take 30 weeks, with only a few of those devoted to saturation airplay. It shouldn’t be any surprise that songs don’t endure evenly over time, but even in recent years, I’ve seen radio programmers try to put together a station’s gold library from chart books, not current listener research. I’ve been asked, “How can it not be a hit anymore? We played the hell out of it at the time.”

Even superstars see their catalogs whittled down to a handful of enduring radio songs. Retweets do not constitute endorsements here, but a decade ago, Stevie Wonder was represented mostly by “Superstition” and “Isn’t She Lovely,” then, as Oldies/Classic Hits radio moved its focus from the ‘70s to the ‘80s, by “Part-Time Lover” and “I Just Called to Say I Love You”

Olivia Newton-John is represented on the radio in the U.S., and even in Australia, primarily by “You’re the One That I Want.” “Physical” is a famous example of a song that didn’t endure, but the Lost 100 research has shown that “Twist of Fate” and “Make a Move on Me” were even more obscured by time.

Prince is a good example of an artist with a lot of songs represented at radio, but “U Got the Look” is less so, and “Batdance” has the No. 21 highest “lost factor” of the ‘80s. Billy Idol is a rare artist with a small catalog of hits that almost all endure now, including some like “Dancing With Myself” that weren’t hits at the time. But even Idol has his lost hits — e.g., “Eyes Without a Face” or “To Be a Lover.”

One issue for Hall & Oates is just that they had more hits than radio and listeners can still make room for. “Maneater” and “Kiss on My List” keep them prominent on the radio. “Out of Touch” still shows up sometimes just because PDs like how it sounds on the radio. Songs on our Lost 100 such as “Family Man” and “Did It in a Minute” are just further down in the pecking order.

Time Wounds All Hits, Then Heals Some Wounds: The passage of time, and particularly the movement of listeners through radio’s 25-to-54-year-old audience target, explains a lot. Top 40 programmers decided they were done with the Bee Gees by 1981. Adult Contemporary programmers brought them back in the mid-‘90s, but even then they played 4-5 songs, rather than an entire catalog. “Stayin’ Alive” was reanimated. “Tragedy” and “Nights on Broadway” were not.

There’s a similar pattern now with mid-to-late ‘90s teen pop. Most stations wouldn’t have even put Spice Girls’ “Wannabe” in their audience research five years ago. Now it’s a song that people love, bolstered by anybody who was 12 years old in 1996 and 36 now. I’ve even heard it on Top 40 stations a few times in recent weeks. But it’s not a deep pool of songs that are heard again. “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys is back. “I Want You Back” by ‘N Sync is not.

No matter how much Taylor Swift struggles at contemporary radio now, it is inevitable that her catalog will be a fixture on the radio again in a decade or so. Her music is a part of too many lives, and eventually the audience that grew up with her won’t care if their kids are still interested or not (and their kids won’t have any input, as they do at today’s CHR). It won’t be every song; probably a half-dozen. But radio and Taylor are almost certainly getting back together.

Time Strikes Twice: Just as contemporary radio turns away from artists after a few years, those stations that play older titles — Classic Hits, Adult Contemporary, even Classic Rock — also sour on titles eventually as listeners age out of the target audience. Disco, including the Bee Gees, came back to the radio in the mid-‘00s, then faded again when AC stations decided to stop playing the ‘70s. It wasn’t long ago that you could count on numerous songs by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac to test. Increasingly, those catalogs become “Hotel California” and “Dreams” only for some stations.

Radio stations that play older songs tend to want to “cheat younger” when they research listener preferences. Increasingly, the listeners who matter to them are those who were teens in the mid-‘80s to late-‘90s. So a lot of ‘70s songs that were reliable testers a few years ago — say, “Baby Hold On” by Eddie Money — are harder to find on the radio now. Even the once unavoidable Steve Miller Band catalog. You probably haven’t noticed these songs getting scarcer yet. But there are also readers thinking, “’Baby Hold On?’ Do I know that?” Of the readers in their mid-30s commenting on the “Lost 100,” many said they weren’t familiar with every song. But many songs were older than they were.

Some Songs Just Weren’t Real Hits in the First Place: There are certainly midsize hits, or songs that weren’t initially hits at all, that have built and thus endured over time, but they’re the exceptions. There are also a few huge hits that radio and listeners chose to turn their back on over time. Some became instantly unhip (“You Light Up My Life”). Some seemed like pretty defining hit records of the time, and it’s hard to say why Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” endures a little, while “Shadow Dancing,” the very definition of “hit record” and the Summer Song of 1978, is turgid or trifling to some people now.

But many of the lost hits on this list are songs that never spent a sustained amount of time in “power rotation” at radio in the first place. There’s not as much chance for listeners to remember them, much less fondly. One industry reader astutely commented that many of these songs were lesser titles from major artists “forced up the charts by promotion. [There are] a lot of follow-up cuts and duds by superstars.”  Many of the “Lost 100” titles were the first single by an act from a new project following a major hit album. Radio considered them disappointments, and didn’t play them in power rotation, but you can’t often tell from the charts. They include:

• Men at Work, “Overkill”
• Madonna, “Who’s That Girl”
• Jacksons, “State of Shock”
• Wham, “I’m Your Man”
• Donna Summer, “Love Is in Control (Finger On The Trigger)
• Huey Lewis & the News, “Perfect World.”
• Daryl Hall, “Dreamtime”
• Daryl Hall & John Oates, “Everything Your Heart Desires”

Again, Daryl Hall & John Oates figure prominently here. “Dreamtime” was a blast of un-H&O-like power pop at a time when big-city Top 40 radio was becoming more dance-oriented. “Everything Your Heart Desires” sounded out-of-place, too, among the hair bands and new jack swing acts of 1988, but it was the duo’s first single on Arista, a label known for the strength of its radio promotion team, and managed to become No. 3 on the Hot 100 (in an era before monitored airplay) and the No. 72 song of the year. Even then, the industry regarded it as a “work record,” not a “real hit.”

Then there are the true “turntable hits,” usually not from core artists — up-tempo songs that just sounded good on the radio for a while. “Don’t Want to Fall In Love” by Jane Child, No. 2 in early 1990, is a definingly great radio record. It pains me that the album got only to No. 49 at the time. It also saddens me that it usually finishes at the bottom of any radio-station research now. And I’m clearly not the only one, because radio stations still want to include it in music testing; I never dissuade them, just in case.

Some Songs Bend Space and Time: A lot of the songs that endure now are helped by their presence in big movie soundtracks seen by people who might not have even lived through them as currents. Even then, it’s a relative handful — “Footloose” but not “Holding Out for a Hero.” (Then again, the former was a bigger hit to begin with.) It’s the same case with TV commercials and movie syncs in the last 15 or so years. Music supervisors anointed a lot of songs, but only a few became “Chasing Cars” or “How to Save a Life.”

Then there are those songs that are remakes or sound retro to begin with, which also confuse the time/space continuum. One common trait among songs on the Lost 100 is that they were throwbacks at the time — “Crying” by Don McLean, “This Little Girl” by Gary “U.S.” Bonds. Again, there are exceptions. “The Longest Time” by Billy Joel endures at radio; “An Innocent Man” makes the Lost 100.

There was a lot of love among ROR readers for “This Little Girl.” Even a decade ago, that song had a presence on WCBS-FM New York. For a while, it was the perfect song for an Oldies/Classic Hits programmer trying to make a station more contemporary — an ‘80s song that sounded like a ‘60s song. (Being written by Bruce Springsteen helped, too.) It was the same as PDs of the era embracing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by Robert John, so they didn’t have to play the bigger, but older, Tokens hit. It’s why “Kokomo” and not “God Only Knows” or “Good Vibrations” represents the Beach Boys at radio now.

In general, though, those are now the songs that radio programmers are trying to escape because “they sound old.” Being reissued as the result of hit movies in the ‘80s definitely gave “Twist and Shout,” “Stand by Me,” and “Do You Love Me” much more currency than other songs from the early ‘60s. Those songs might still test in music research, along with “What a Wonderful World” (recorded in 1968, but not an American hit until 1988 and Good Morning Vietnam), but radio wants to move on anyway.

Pop/Rock Has A Quorum: It’s been long noted that pop/rock crossovers are the songs that endure most, often disproportionate to their airplay at the time. Those songs have the advantage of airplay at Classic Rock, Classic Hits, “Adult Hits” stations like Bob- and Jack-FM, and often Adult Contemporary stations. Beyond that, many Classic Hits stations typically use their listener research to look at the strength of genres overall. Often, a ‘80s pop/rock grouping of songs and/or the ‘80s new wave/MTV/rock will do better than an “’80s pop” catch-all that often contains at least one Hall & Oates song used to signify the era.  So even when “Maneater” does well in a radio station’s music library testing, some Classic Hits stations are more likely to prioritize Bon Jovi over Hall & Oates, even if they play both.

Who Put Broadcast Radio in Charge? For a lot of readers, all these machinations are just making them glad to be SiriusXM subscribers or Spotify users. Having worked in the radio-research business for nearly two decades, I can only say that music research has generally borne itself out over the years. Stations that have had access to research have generally done better than those that do not. And for those Jack- or Bob-FM type stations that like to surprise and delight from time to time, knowing what the hits are in the first place makes it easier to take calculated chances.

Beyond that, even music lovers often like the hits, and can’t agree on the songs below them. As veteran newsman Peter King wrote, “Most of these should stay lost as far as I’m concerned, but many are on my iPod so what the hell.” It was typical for readers to agree that 80% of the Lost 100 were lost for cause. But there was no consensus on what should stay. One commenter gave a pass to three songs — Steve Winwood, “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do”; Hall & Oates, “Family Man”; and Bob Seger, “Shame on the Moon.” If your own three “gimme” songs match, the two of you should chat.

Chances are, however, that your forgotten faves are different, which is why it’s hard for radio to go deeper. One favorite story is the Washington, D.C., councilman whose printed all-time top 10 was dominated by “Carry On Wayward Son”-level Classic Rock warhorses, with two exceptions: “Words” by the Monkees — a lost 1967 near-hit B-side — and Eddie Rabbitt’s yacht/country “Suspicions.” “Words” is an all-time favorite, while I might let “Suspicions” play once if I heard it, but I rarely do. 

It is certainly possible as time goes on, other audio outlets will do more to set the agenda, particularly by the time that Taylor Swift’s hits become oldies. As radio fragments, its competitors won’t be as able to create a shared experience, or need to. “Blueberry Faygo” and “The Box” and other hits that streaming helped create, are a shared experience among younger listeners now, and they may not need a quorum going forward. For now, how a song endures is a mix of not just your childhood memories, but those of everybody else who shares your radio station, including some listeners who have no memories of that song as a current hit at all.