It’s a fun all-ages trifle now, but when “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” by Edison Lighthouse was a current, it was viewed as a sign of Top 40 radio’s desperation. The competition at rock radio was Led Zeppelin II and the Doors’ Morrison Hotel. “Rosemary” wasn’t even really bubblegum; it was the beginning of the particularly polarizing MOR wing of the K-Tel/Rhino ’70s. And yet “Rosemary” recently found a new place in pop culture, at least as soon as all the decades-old Christmas songs had run their course for another year.
Edison Research’s Tom Webster was mostly responding to a Variety article about the state of podcasting, but he also took a moment to address Ted Gioia’s widely quoted Is Old Music Killing New Music? Webster bemoaned a lack of melody and harmonies of the sort that you heard in the pop music of, say, 1992. That’s a year that could only look good at a distance; at the time CHR was sinking into a slump that many thought would be its last — outshone by Country, Alternative, and Hip-Hop. But, of course, it sounds better now.
The chart Webster references has its moments — “Black or White,” “All for Love,” “Mysterious Ways.” It also had “I’m Too Sexy,” which probably provoked the same “is that your best, really?” response as “Rosemary.” And it had “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which Top 40 wouldn’t play. If 1992 seems like a boom time by comparison, looking at the 1970 chart really makes you wonder what people were complaining about — that chart has “ABC,” “Let It Be,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again),” and “Spirit in the Sky.”
Gioia’s piece is one of multiple articles now circulating about the dire condition of current music and the radio stations that play it. Dorian Lynskey’s Why Pop Can’t Escape the ‘80s looks at the reliance of the Weeknd and others on what he calls pop’s last mass-appeal decade. But at this moment of old music’s cryptic currency, any era is fair game: three Elton John songs, two of them less-known, will do. So will “Toxic” mashed up with “Pony.” Anything seems better than now.
Writing about the Lost Factor of hits over the last 40 years has reinforced my belief that no year is a total write-off musically. So have years of watching current hits make their way to the gold library. The Bob- and Jack-FM format took hold in Canada in 2003, in part as a vote of no confidence in current music. Now Canadian stations are switching to a late ‘90s/early ‘00s format.
We might well decide that the food was not so lousy in January 2022. But the portions truly are small, and not regularly replenished. After subsisting for over a year on “Blinding Lights” and three Dua Lipa hits, Top 40’s product flow improved last year. So why does it feel like there’s a shortage of true hits, as evidenced by a seven-month power (“Stay”) and the resurgent 18-month-old “Heat Waves” at No. 1? Or maybe it’s the same thing meal after meal, since most CHR stations haven’t followed WHTZ (Z100) New York’s move from 119x a week on its power rotation songs to 85x.
Different formats have different issues and, as Edison’s Larry Rosin notes, almost none are thriving with current music. Country is locked into a year-long chart process, still unsure how to respond to the rise of streaming. Alternative and Hip-Hop were the first to be seemingly diminished by streaming nearly a decade ago. Adult R&B and Mainstream AC formats remain successful, but their biggest stations play minimal currents. The exceptions are Christian AC and Triple-A, which aren’t viewed by the industry as stealing hit music’s spotlight in the same way as Album Rock radio in 1970 or Alternative in 1992, but perhaps should be.
I’m glad that so much older music has found its way back to the mainstream — from streaming, from movie and advertising syncs, and from music competition shows. I marvel at the caprice of “Love Grows” and “These Days” by Nico resurfacing in the same week. I once resented those wacky kids who didn’t spend at least a year of their adolescence listening to Oldies radio and an early adulthood in used-record stores, but I’m over that if it rewards artists and their life work.
Gioia’s much-quoted stat about current music’s share shrinking from 35% to 30% of consumption hides that music has been a business of catalog for years. But the CD’s rise in the mid-’80s took place when current-based radio was more vital and never rankled, in part because the record business was still willing to plow so much of its earnings back into promoting radio.
Current-based music formats on broadcast radio may indeed be facing an existential crisis–the same challenges that music radio did on AM in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. There is no guarantee of fixing anything. I can only say that things will not improve on radio’s current course, and if radio addresses its new-music issues, it would sound better. And here’s what we need to do to get there.
Rethink and repair the radio/records relationship. Streaming is a great proposition for labels, especially without the high “cost of doing business” that went with each project. The good news is that labels still want to bring their streaming successes to radio — e.g., Olivia Rodrigo — and regard radio as still capable of delivering the proverbial “next level.” The downside is that there are fewer attempts to create great “radio records” — the fun, uptempo songs that reflect what we have been taught hit songs sound like all our lives.
Sometimes streaming delivers a radio record more easily than radio might on its own volition. “Fancy Like” would have taken 10 months at Country radio and been less consistently embraced by pop without streaming. “That’s What I Want” by Lil Nas X is a classic “radio record,” and it comes from one of the artists who most dented the paradigm. As often, though, streaming is bringing us the songs that might once have been dismissed as “too good for radio.” And like the TV and movie syncs of the mid-’00s, it can only send so many “Chasing Cars”-type outliers across the transom. (Steve Greenberg summarizes it well here.)
Radio needs to do a better job acknowledging streaming stories, and finally is. But radio also needs radio records. Music’s ISPs profess disinterest in radio, and yet the classic radio records — “Levitating” or “Bad Habits” — find their place in the firmament, too. Radio has about half the number of hits it needs now; it could get through that number by both acknowledging streaming and breaking those songs itself. The music business has happily found one profit center; it could be even happier with two if there were finally a reasonable give-and-take between both sides.
Nearly two years ago, and days before the COVID-19 epidemic, I wrote an advance story for an All Access Radio Summit about what a healthier radio/records relationship might look like. That gathering was postponed, but most of the questions raised then remain relevant.
Learn to better support “radio records.” For most of the decade — since radio began to lose its hegemony for music discovery — I have suggested a number of ways that radio could more effectively promote new music than a new-music stager alone. I still stand behind them:
- Make the music director a “music supervisor,” and an on-air presence;
- Bring listeners into the music meeting, and on to the air;
- Empower MDs to find new music again. Do it for Rosalie Trombley.
I have a simple one to add to that list. Radio stations should probably create videos for TikTok and elsewhere on each new song added — both as an additional way of supporting songs they believe in and as a way of putting stations in front of listeners online.
Create stations that can break records.
I’ve talked a lot about small-market CHR stations such as WIXX Green Bay, Wis., which plays a decidedly different version of Top 40 radio. Yesterday, the fall ’21 Nielsens came back and WIXX went 11.1-13.5. WIXX still has the ability to break its own hits. “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)” by Elle King & Miranda Lambert went to power in about a month. WIXX had something few stations even aspire to last year — a local hit for pop/punk band the Astronomers.
Radio needs more great local stations like WIXX. Radio also needs more truly national channels, and I’ve advocated for both. Gioia declares that even satellite radio plays mostly older music. Even if that’s true for the number of channels, SXM has the closest thing to an American version of BBC Radio 1 in its Hits 1 channel, and something truly different in TikTok Radio. I’ve commented lately that SXM offers a great traditional radio experience. Only Triple-A and some Active Rock outlets do so with as much consistency.
Broadcasters need their own national stations, too. A truly national commercial CHR might have more clout and appeal than some of our struggling trying-to-sound-local outlets. A national outlet for new AC or Adult R&B music would be more viable than competing with gold-based stations on the local level.
If this is indeed an issue of platform, not programming, consider that in the summer of 1982, there were two all-time-great AM stations doing Top 40 against the odds. KFRC San Francisco held off the inevitable from 1980-84, but eventually was too fragmented by the launch of KITS and KMEL. KKBQ (79Q) was so successful on AM that it was moved to FM in five months’ time. If what radio ultimately needs to have more hits is to find its place on the next platform, national stations and local franchises with worldwide appeal are how we will get there.
Meanwhile, I continue to find new music I like at least as much as “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes),” and maybe as much as “I’m Too Sexy.” Here’s this week’s playlist of CHR hits and those that could be.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com