Made You Listen: How Taylor (And Meghan) Helped Top 40 Reclaim My Road Trip

One of the great things about “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift is that it reclaimed this year’s Thanksgiving road trip on behalf of Top 40 radio. In recent years, the default radio station on car trips has become SiriusXM’s Triple-A The Spectrum. There is no tolerance in the car for anything noisy/sludgy. There is no patience for hitting the new station in any town just before the stopset and not hearing music. So the song by which I remember this road trip should have been “I’m Just a Clown” by Charley Crockett.

Instead, our four-hour Thanksgiving drives belonged to “Anti-Hero.” It was new and fresh enough to enjoy five times over the course of the weekend. It still gave that sense you rarely get from a car trip these days of a big hit emerging. That might seem odd to say about a five-week Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit and a song that is already No. 3 in Top 40 airplay. But “Anti-Hero” is still a six-week-old song, and after road trips where “Heat Waves” and “Blinding Lights” sent me scurrying back to the Spectrum, the feeling of Top 40 radio was fresher this time. 

Listening to more Top 40 meant that I got to hear a brand-new song, Nicky Youre’s “Eyes on You,” multiple times in the wild, another experience I haven’t had lately (but it’s already in power on SXM Hits1). It was also a victory lap for Meghan Trainor’s “Made You Look.” Four years ago, I loved Trainor’s “All the Ways,” which certainly seemed like the uptempo medium-weight pop hit that Top 40 radio needed. But Trainor was so beyond her initial hits that the song never got to CHR, making me wonder if I still knew what Top 40 needed. Then the surprise hit of 2022 became “I Ain’t Worried,” which has a similar feel.

It’s almost time for Ross on Radio’s “Songs That Made a Difference in 2022” article — not necessarily (or often) my favorite songs of the year, but those that steered a format or all of radio in a changing direction. But Meghan and Taylor allow for a number of different discussions this week, particularly when it comes to a certain controversial Hot 100 accomplishment. Making Top 40 road trips fun again is only the start of it. Perhaps the saddest part about the early ’90s doldrums, when every market had a new Oldies FM but most didn’t have Top 40, was when the most-heard song of a road trip was “More Today Than Yesterday.”

In addition, Taylor and Meghan have both pulled off a rare feat. Trainor returned to the faux-’50s sound of her breakthrough hits of eight years ago. Swift got listeners’ attention two years ago by not trying to make radio records. Much of Midnights is very much the work of somebody who’s been making Triple-A/Americana records for several years, but “Anti-Hero” proves that the old Taylor (or at least the mid-period Taylor) had never really been killed off. 

Usually when an artist is willing to please the crowd again, it’s too late. George Michael needed only a few years to make uptempo, fun records again, by which time his place in the queue at Top 40 was entirely lost, at least in America. Alanis Morissette needed nearly a decade to steer back to the sound of “Jagged Little Pill.” Sting and David Byrne needed most of their adult careers. “Everybody’s Coming to My House” could have been a great, fun uptempo radio song, but if Meghan Trainor wasn’t being taken seriously in 2018, what chance did a Talking Heads soundalike have? It’s interesting as well that Trainor kept herself in the public eye with successful Christmas singles, which is sometimes an acknowledgement that an artist does not expect to return to contemporary radio any other way.

As with OneRepublic, there’s evidence here that the core acts of a decade ago are Top 40’s core acts again. There are a lot of successful CHRs where Maroon 5’s “Beautiful Mistake” made it to power rotation because 31-year-olds still consider them a prominent band. I’ve suggested before that Top 40’s best shot at fostering a new mother/daughter coalition is to again make adults happy enough in the car to perhaps lure their kids out from under the earbuds. The other adult on my particular car trip was willing to leave Top 40 on this time. “Hey, the music’s pretty good now” may take a few more rides.

“Anti-Hero” is Taylor’s first consensus power in six years or so, and we should be glad she wants one. After a decade of viral hits, from “Gangnam Style” to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” I still watch to see if labels still see an upside in going to Top 40 radio. In 2022, there was no motivation for Bad Bunny to gear a record to English-language CHR. Sending a 10-minute reworked album cut to No. 1 could have removed Swift’s impetus to make a radio hit. But her Hot 100 release week of Top 10 domination still included radio’s participation, even if streams alone would have done the job. And while we ponder just what a hit is these days, “Anti-Hero” still registers as more of a hit than “Cardigan” or “Willow” to me. 

One thing that became clear in this discussion is that the ability to land at No. 1 on the Hot 100 immediately has changed readers’ perception of radio’s timing. With both Harry Styles’ “As It Was” and “Anti-Hero,” I’ve heard from friends who felt that radio was initially skeptical about both songs. In reality, songs that made it to No. 1 in even seven weeks were considered phenomenal in the ’70s or ’80s. Perhaps the lesson is that Top 40 needs a “power new” category that barely differs from “power” (New York’s Z100 tried that briefly), but radio did not fight either song. Radio was, briefly, cautious with “About Damn Time,” but even that was a reasonably direct ascent.

Ironically, even some readers who do believe that first-week Hot 100 No. 1’s should be power rotation immediately were still upset about seeing Swift occupy the top 10, and in doing so eclipse the Beatles’ 1964 top 5 domination. “Can you talk all the old-timers off a ledge about … their ‘pure’ charts?” asked one label reader. “Do these people have any idea what the ’80s charts were like?” 

As an old-timer, I remember pretty vividly what the Billboard charts were like at various points in the mid-’70s and again in the late ’70s/early ’80s. At that point, I was comparing Billboard with the much more transparent airplay charts in Radio & Records, and I was aware that certain songs couldn’t possibly have enough sales to be No. 37 with airplay at only eight radio stations. I’ve always been able to accept those moments as bad referee calls — they inform the standings, but don’t invalidate them. I’ve also learned from Saturday’s American Top 40 twitter thread that people regard any song they don’t know, or simply don’t like, as an obvious product of skullduggery.

The Hot 100 now is not the one we hear counted down on Saturday morning. I think of it now as the Meta 100, wrangling many disparate stories into a total picture that is absolutely relevant if you’re an artist, A&R person, or chart manager, but which doesn’t yet guarantee that a song will be experienced by a majority of music consumers as a hit. I find myself wishing there were a second chart, drawn more tightly around the radio universe. In some ways, this was attempted by Billboard’s Pop 100 chart of the ’00s, but I don’t want it drawn that tightly.

The Hot 100 chart I would find most useful is the one that uses most of the same inputs now — of course radio people should want to know what songs are streaming — but weights them differently. I’d like streaming to have roughly the same weight vs. airplay that sales did in the ’70s, informing but not overwhelming airplay. There are pure airplay charts available, of course, but unless radio displays more musical enterprise again, I need outside input to help find hits.

Wanting the radio universe to still define what the hits are might seem like a gimme that radio no longer earns. I think having an alternate more radio-driven chart would be a more accurate indicator of “common denominator hits” as understood by most people. Ruling the metaverse and having a hit that everybody knows are increasingly two different things. I’d like to see both. Just as we watched songs “cross over” between formats in our youth, having both charts would allow more songs to develop more stories and cross between streaming and radio. 

A chart with radio as its motor would be more useful if radio was breaking more music, or being given more music by the labels to break. Thanksgiving weekend reinforced that Top 40 is more exciting when things happen faster. As oddities drift over from streaming, then attempt to keep a radio story going until research can kick in, I have increasingly found myself thinking it would be just fine for those songs to peak at No. 13. I don’t necessarily want another eight weeks with those songs as they struggle from No. 13 to No. 8; I want new songs. The trick is making that a viable model for labels and radio.