The Best Billboard Top 10 in Ages?

June 21, 2024 radionewsfeeds US Comments Off on The Best Billboard Top 10 in Ages?
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The good news about Top 40 was coming in at a fairly rapid clip last week. I profiled WKST (96.1 Kiss) Pittsburgh, Pa., and WHTZ (Z100) New York, but May’s PPM ratings had two dozen other success stories I could have as easily written about. (WRVW [The River] Nashville went 4.9-5.8 later that day, along with several other rebounds.)

Last Tuesday, Billboard published a story about the reduced footprint of bringbacks and reissues on the Hot 100, attributed to a better flow of superstar product. That Wednesday, LiveLine’s John Garabedian noted that the bulk of the syndicated night show’s requests were suddenly for new music. That same day, the Washington Post declared  “The Song of Summer is Happening Whether You Like It or Not” after years of being “not worth talking about.” 

That made this tweet the next day from the Wall Street Journal that much more curious:

The Journal article hinged on what it characterized as a disappointing reaction to the Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, and Dua Lipa projects. Several days after, Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department celebrated its eighth straight week at No. 1. A few days later, Eilish had a single in Billboard’s top 10, the No. 2 album, and the likelihood of at least one Top 10 CHR single and possibly two. 

Gene Bean Baxter KROQ Cup Of Tea
Gene ‘Bean’ Baxter

The tweet didn’t mention Sabrina Carpenter (acknowledged toward the end of the WSJ story itself), the excitement over Chappel Roan, or, more important, all the consensus hits that have emerged in recent months. That’s why this tweet from veteran morning man Gene “Bean” Baxter resonated more for me.

The top 10 that Baxter was referring to was this one, and it did stand out among charts over the last year for being populated by radio records of some sort, “not just big artist debuts.”

What’s interesting when you break this week’s top 10 down is that not all of those songs were readily apparent as radio records. A few were exactly the type of songs that emerge from streaming and initially puzzle radio:

  1. Post Malone f/Morgan Wallen, “I Had Some Help” — Two radio superstars with a song embraced immediately by radio.
  2. Sabrina Carpenter, “Please Please Please” — Growing rapidly at radio since its release, waiting in the queue only behind …
  3. Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso” — Radio put lots of work into developing “Nonsense” and “Feather” before Carpenter finally released a song that had a streaming story immediately.
  4. Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” — Found through streaming, but a record that both Top 40 and Country radio could quickly and easily embrace because of the artist’s ties to Beyoncé and the song’s connection to J-Kwon.
  5. Tommy Richman, “Million Dollar Baby” — Emerged through streaming and briefly challenged programmers’ sense of what a hit song sounded like. Nominally rap, but as much of a piece with loping midtempo streaming-driven hits like “Bad Habit” and “End of Beginning.”
  6. Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us” – It was less than three months ago that Slate’s Chris Molanphy was noting with surprise that rap battle songs were able to top the Hot 100, even without airplay. But this one is No. 1 at Urban and Rhythmic Top 40 and No. 39 at CHR at this writing. 
  7. Hozier, “Too Sweet” — It was recognized as exactly the type of record radio needed within days of release, but that would not have likely happened to a new Hozier single without a streaming story. 
  8. Eminem, “Houdini” — His biggest radio record in a decade, although that hasn’t yet buoyed it against a No. 2-8 Hot 100 drop in the first two weeks.
  9. Billie Eilish, “Birds of a Feather” — “Lunch” is still growing at CHR, but the “no advance single” strategy of Hit Me Hard and Soft meant that “Birds” had both its radio supporters and a streaming story practically by lunchtime that Friday.
  10. Teddy Swims, “Lose Control” — Like “Beautiful Things” directly below at No.11, another totem of Top 40’s greater Triple-A influence. The first song that isn’t yet a significant CHR hit is Zach Bryan’s “Pink Skies” at No. 12 on Billboard. 

Top 40’s time of early-’90s crisis — its greatest until recent years — was marked by the debut of SoundScan information and weekly new sales stories that radio wasn’t quite sure how to process. The time between SoundScan’s advent and CHR’s comeback was about five years, so it is perhaps not coincidental that radio has needed a similar amount of time to decide which streaming stories are, well, mainstream rather than extreme. Plus, having a Hozier or Sabrina Carpenter in the center makes Eminem or Kendrick Lamar more workable.

I like this Billboard top 10, too. As noted in the previous story, I’m trying to be clear-eyed about what either the change in the tenor of pop product or the rebound of some Top 40 radio stations means, but it’s also worth noting that if major-market stations with a lot of cume such as Z100 or KIIS Los Angeles can sustain their ratings comebacks, then radio will have a greater Hot 100 impact.

Because I am trying to be clear-eyed, my optimism about this week’s Top 10 also requires me to say:

  • Top 40 still has a hard time finding consensus hits for power rotation. 
  • Two of the three Hip-Hop songs are so heavily redacted that their radio versions are still mostly advertisements for streaming the unedited version, something that has been an issue for radio in recent years.
  • I appreciate the male/female balance among artists at CHR now. But PDs would be wise to monitor that on an ongoing basis, especially if more of our hits are coming from Country. 
  • I would be even happier about the balance if there were a pop/rock record or uptempo R&B title in the mix. 
  • Seeing streaming and radio find common ground shouldn’t tempt radio to give up its enterprise on developing music on its own once and for all. At radio, there are stations where both “Feather” and “Espresso” are powers, and I’m hoping that the industry sees the value of the work that CHR put into “Feather” as part of Carpenter’s current story.

As for the Journal story’s contention that no one album or artist is dominating the cultural conversation:

Swift’s eight weeks at No. 1 weakens that argument. While another Billboard story this week plays up the role of special releases in bolstering its stay at the top, I would suggest that after eight weeks, the original narrative about Poets (“the whole world thought it was just okay”) deserves to be modified a little. And, hey, even that story shows how much sway Swift still holds. And if it’s an uptempo hit you want from Swift, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” sounded great when I heard it on the UK’s Capital FM this week. 

So does Eilish. She is one of two artists who has the trifecta of a hit Hot 100 single, a top-five Billboard album, and a radio-ratified hit (because I’m willing to call “Birds” that now). (The other is Shaboozey.) Eilish is one of streaming’s original stealth-success stories. She has just come off a hit single (“What Was I Made For?”) that few artists could have pulled off, even with Barbie. She has steadily been part of the cultural conversation and remains so.

Sustained cultural dominance is hard when our current strategy calls for albums to be front-loaded with hits, rather than yielding 3-4 hits over the course of a year. The Journal story talks about how Swift had more long-running hits from Midnights, but it’s comparing the new album’s first eight weeks to a year-long hit streak from one of the few artists still pursuing a traditional “next single” strategy.

  • When an artist such as Carpenter is burdened with fewer expectations, the front-loading strategy allows her to go from strength to strength. It has worked less well for Dua Lipa, who now has a history of songs whose full value has often not been shown until the next single was out. After seeing how “Dance the Night” finally tested, I would encourage PDs to keep “Houdini,” “Illusion,” and “Training Season” all in callout for a while.
  • It’s worth noting that how some of our current surprise hitmakers — Teddy Swims, Noah Kahan, Benson Boone — are artists who had the ability to build traditional artist-breaking stories off the radar, both in terms of developing over multiple projects and through the extended success of a single project. Part of what’s proving Swims and Boone’s value is having viable follow-up singles. 
  • I still hear a lot of potential singles from Cowboy Carter. Radio got the second single it asked for in “II Most Wanted,” which then got overshadowed by other Country-flavored songs and Country crossovers. The willingness to keep going on a Beyoncé album is what got us “Irreplaceable,” “Halo,” and “Sweet Dreams.” The artist herself tired of that process, and neither labels or radio are so inclined to “milk” an album these days, but radio would benefit from a full-fledged Beyoncé smash and shouldn’t move on.

Pop-music comebacks are, in the initial days, usually characterized not by one culture-dominating artist, but by a steady stream of hits. The excitement of 1982, as Top 40 disembarked from the music now known as yacht rock, included some established hitmakers (Olivia Newton-John, Fleetwood Mac), some budding superstars (John Cougar Mellencamp) and a lot of acts whose hit streaks were of varying magnitudes (A Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, Laura Branigan, Soft Cell, Joan Jett, Human League) but helped radio in the aggregate. 

Top 40’s moment of multiple consumer-press superstars (Tina, Michael, Lionel, Prince, Bruce, Cyndi) didn’t come until 1984, two years later. I’ve recently observed how spring ’24 recalls 1995, when acts who we’d now characterize as Triple-A helped begin the format’s reset. Even that story is nearly 30 years old and from a galaxy far away, but the landscape had already changed significantly between 1982 and 1995 as well. 

Whether pop music is in the process of a real comeback now will depend, as it did in those eras, with who’s in the wings, but also on what we do with the artists we have now, and with our stations. For now, I’m happy about this week’s chart and hope we have a few more like it this year.

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