Lost Factor: Bob Dylan vs. Paul Simon

Years ago, I had a conversation with a co-worker who believed that Paul Simon, not Bob Dylan, would be the artist for the ages. Dylan was the critics’ favorite, but Simon was the people’s poet. Until last week, I hadn’t felt the need to mediate this one. I had reason to believe they both would be retrieved from my music collection from time to time.

By now, the more public, large-scale version of this discussion, prompted by the sale of Simon’s catalog, is very much last week’s Twitter dust-up. But after a year of “Lost Factor” articles looking at how songs endure, I was interested in what airplay had to tell us about how the two catalogs, most famous for their 45-to-55-year-old compositions, were holding up at radio so far.

If you buy in to one rock critic’s harsh judgment, you probably don’t consider airplay to be the arbiter of worthiness in the first place. The “Lost Factor” — my measure of the trajectory between chart dominance then and radio silence now — can be equally unkind to the reviled and the revered. The 1984 rankings show a virtual tie between “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” by Julio Iglesias & Willie Nelson and “They Don’t Know” by Tracey Ullman; if you’re reading this article, the latter has a strong chance of being a favorite.

The broadcast radio stations measured by BDSradio are mostly top-100 market stations with significant audiences. SiriusXM’s “‘60s on 6” and “‘70s on 7” channels, where many people wanting to hear either artist on the radio might listen first, are unmonitored. But monitored airplay does tell a story of what endures with a wider audience, whether it’s the result of a music test or a programmer’s guess.

If it’s just spins over the last seven days you’re looking at, here’s what BDS shows, along with some admittedly provocative other benchmarks:

• Bill Withers – 570 U.S. spins
• Bob Dylan – 575 spins
• Elvis Presley – 770 spins
• Aretha Franklin – 1,000 spins
• Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel – 1,200 spins
• Isley Brothers – 1,400 spins (for anybody who watched their Verzuz faceoff with Earth, Wind & Fire this week)
• Jimi Hendrix – 2,300 spins
• Survivor – 2,400 spins
• Earth, Wind & Fire – 2,600 spins
• Bruce Springsteen – 3,400 spins
• Backstreet Boys – 3,500 spins
• Beatles – 4,700 spins
• Fleetwood Mac – 6,800 spins 
• Prince – 7,300 spins
• Bon Jovi – 10,500 spins
• Journey – 11,400 spins
• Queen – 11,800 spins
• Michael Jackson – 12,900 spins
• Taylor Swift – 22,000 spins
• Justin Bieber – 40,300 spins
• Ariana Grande – 46,100 spins

Recency matters with airplay (and, to be fair, today’s artists aren’t facing the test of time yet). So does catalog. Between solo and duo work, Simon had more Top 40 hit singles to begin with, at least in terms of songs big enough to make the Billboard year-end top 100. (That said, nearly 2,100 of Survivor’s spins are driven by “Eye of the Tiger” alone.) 

It’s also worth knowing that the Dylan song that had become his most enduring at radio, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” saw many stations switch to the Guns N’ Roses version in recent years, which limits Dylan’s own spins but affirms his catalog. Same with the Classic Rock airplay of Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower.” (Then again, “Mrs. Robinson” likely endures today in part because of the recency of the Lemonheads’ ’90s cover.)

“Lost Factor” measures not just airplay now, but airplay proportionate to how big a song was at the time. Our benchmark for enduring airplay is typically a “Lost Factor” of 1.0 or lower. It’s important to remember that the songs that have topped our annual calculations often have scores of 50 or higher; the No. 1 song of 1960, “Theme from ‘A Summer Place’” had a score of 100 for the week measured.   

Paul Simon/Simon & Garfunkel had more and bigger hit singles than Bob Dylan. Simon had 11 songs that made the year-end top 100; Dylan had three. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” didn’t make 1973’s year-end chart. Neither did Simon’s most recent hit single, “You Can Call Me Al.”

But having more songs that did make the year-end charts means that Simon is the artist with more songs above a 1.0 — seven such songs compared to Dylan’s one. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was the No. 1 song of 1970, but received only 40 monitored spins last week, giving it a Lost Factor of 2.5. (For the week during which I first measured 1970 last year, it had fewer spins and a Lost Factor of 3.7.)

That said, Simon also has more songs below a 1.0 as well, meaning that they outperform their initial placing. “Kodachrome” is lowest with an 0.3 Lost Factor, followed by “Cecilia” with an 0.4. Without being able to measure “Knockin’ On Heaven’ Door,” Dylan’s most enduring song is “Like A Rolling Stone” (0.86).

When it comes to Earth, Wind & Fire vs. the Isley Brothers, the latter group had more multi-format radio hits. Only one (“Serpentine Fire”) is above LF1, while “September” is at a not-surprisingly-low 0.02. All five of the Isleys’ entries on the year-end Top 100 are at a 1.0 or higher. That said, the Isleys have the more extensive catalog of album cuts that were played like singles at R&B radio, but never charted, as evidenced by seeing “Voyage to Atlantis” light up Twitter last Sunday night.

The current endurance of an artist who had their hits in the ’60s or ’70s is not the test of “hundreds of years from now.” Neither is it insignificant, when it’s hard for almost any ‘60s artist to remain front-and-center, especially without Classic Rock radio, the broadcast format that still most plays that decade, and which has discarded much of the singer/songwriter aspect of the format.

The sale of their catalogs will likely help both Dylan and Simon over the years; it’s that sort of catalog promotion that drives movie and TV syncs, which is one of the ways the needle moves as airplay trails off over time. There are more organic opportunities now for older titles, but it’s worth noting that even last year’s much-discussed TikTok moment for Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” involved a song that never left the radio, in part because it’s a song that still has a chance of being heard today by a listener who didn’t grow up with it. Then again, the drum battle and final coda of Simon’s “The Obvious Child” would make for some pretty good viral video moments, too.