It’s been clear for a while that older music has an advantage in pop culture. New songs are interpolations of older songs, or, very occasionally, outright remakes like “Fast Car.” Even the “current” chart hits might be a four-year-old Taylor Swift LP cut or even a decade-old unreleased track. A TV synch can make “Running Up That Hill” the hit it almost became in 1985. TikTok can propel a 60-year-old Lesley Gore album cut into pop culture.
On radio, the ratings of current-driven formats struggle, except for Country and Christian AC. More than ever, Classic Rock and Classic Hits are becoming all-ages formats, prompting the theory that even younger audiences care about radio only for older music. Streaming alone can’t guarantee that everybody will know a song. But increasingly, there is a greater gulf between the CHR airplay charts, where Sabrina Carpenter’s “Feather” was just No. 1, and the Billboard Hot 100, where its highest position is No. 26.
The odds are portrayed as particularly stacked against new music in a recent New York Times guest essay, Marc Hogan’s Same Old Song: Private Equity is Destroying Our Music Ecosystem. Hogan posits that the recent investment in artist and writer catalogs, and the myriad related uses — movies, ad synchs, new interpolated hits — has led to a “markedly blander music scene, as financiers cannibalize the past at the expense of the future.”
I hadn’t really thought of new music’s challenges in those terms before. But the diminished interest in radio by some record labels, along with layoffs across radio-promotion departments, has been a consistent topic here, made worse by a seemingly mutual antipathy by some broadcasters. When Universal Music Group decided to pull its music from TikTok in a royalty dispute, it was Spotify, not radio, with whom UMG wanted to create a greater partnership.
If your definition of a hit song is that shared experience that everybody knows (even if they barely follow popular music) and everybody hears everywhere, there are fewer hits now, but that doesn’t seem to bother anybody nearly enough. Radio was, for many years, a major investment for every single song, even when you didn’t hear about reporting stations demanding an artist concert, or a fax machine, in exchange for adding a song. Labels are happy to make the lesser streaming or TikTok investment in hopes that a 30-second “sound” will break itself, and, unlike with radio, there’s a performance royalty for every spin.
Old music has an advantage under a system that lets AC radio report to the Hot 100, even at Christmas time. Old music has an advantage because, as Edison Research’s Larry Rosin has noted, now every stream of a song counts. When I bought “Just What I Needed” by the Cars and played it for several hours straight, it added one sale to the chart tally. Now the 30-or-so consecutive spins would each count.
If there is a conspiracy against new music, how do we respond? Leaning more heavily on the music of the last 20 years has not yet been a consistently winning strategy after several years of throwback formats and CHR dominated by gold titles. Beyond Country, current-based formats have less music to choose from and less of a footprint with which to break it. Here are some thoughts on how we can give new music a better chance.
Play it all day. Giving any new CHR music the bulk of its airplay in nights and overnights is a strategy left over from a very different time — when Top 40 controlled teen listening, when nights were a station’s biggest daypart, and when there were numerous nighttime showcases for new music (“make it or break it,” “top 8 at 8,” etc.).
The need for all-day airplay is particularly notable for some of the songs that could be adding variety and adult appeal to pop radio. Even under the old paradigm, a song like Shinedown’s “A Symptom of Being Human” would have been an adult balance record of particular value in middays. Shinedown Music’s Lou Rizzo says that when there’s daytime airplay, the difference in the song’s metrics is “staggering.” (He also thinks that would be the case for any song, not just his pop/rock record.)
All-day airplay is a risk we’ve trained ourselves not to take over the years. But a lot of CHRs have nothing to lose at this point, and might benefit from a deeper pool of songs to draw from during the day, rather than having to rely on one more spin of “Replay” by Iyaz. There also aren’t a lot of PDs who believe that mood by daypart is significantly different now, as evidenced by the Classic Hits PDs who would have no trouble with “Paradise City” at 9 a.m. Any PD who reads this and pulls back on new music at night too is misunderstanding my intent. I don’t think it’s possible to truly know if something was a hit without daytime play.
Make It Multi-Format. “Feather” is a record receiving plenty of all-day CHR airplay. It is also the No. 11 record at Hot AC. But it doesn’t have the multi-format penetration of Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” the song that succeeded it at No. 1 CHR, and is also No. 1 at Hot AC with significant airplay at Triple-A, Adult R&B, and Rhythmic Top 40. While it’s too much to expect every song to have that sort of wide appeal, “Feather” could benefit on the Hot 100 from having major-market AC spins as well.
The rise of streaming means that there’s less time for songs to make their way from format to format before being judged on their response. In addition, some songs are likely to be supported by different formats in different places. Any song being worked to Hot AC now should also be worked to WIXX Green Bay, Wis. (which played Shinedown when Hot AC played it); WKRZ Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; WAEZ Johnson City, Tenn.; WNCI Columbus, Ohio, etc.
Stations that happen to have relatively similar stations in their cluster should be thinking in those terms, too. It wasn’t good for CHR, Hot AC, and AC to be so close to each other in the early ’00s as a result of PPM measurement and CHR’s dominance. But it would be healthier for all three formats if Alternative shared more with both Active Rock and CHR.
Be a little “over the top” in your support. When radio noticed streaming’s inroads, it responded, briefly, with stagers emphasizing “new music discovery.” Those sweepers were often in front of fourth singles or songs that were many weeks old, even on that particular station. Once that battle seemed lost, I stopped hearing much beyond a new-music stager, sometimes artist-voiced. (It’s worth noting that Country is the format that makes the most and most effective use of artist stagers.)
For years, I’ve suggested ways that radio could better champion new music on the air. Make your Program or Music Director the “music supervisor” and make them an ongoing on-air presence throughout the day, especially when new titles are playing. And while I’d prefer that this stewardship take place in real time, there’s no reason in the voice-tracking era that every spin of a new song can’t be endorsed by a personality, even if it’s not one actually on the air during that shift.
I’ve also felt that there’s an opportunity for stations to champion new music beyond their airwaves. Recently, I wrote that the UMG/TikTok split meant that radio stations should encourage listener-created videos either on their own websites or on their YouTube channels. There should probably also be DJ-created videos on YouTube, TikTok (when possible), and elsewhere. Radio’s value is greater if it can create streaming stories, not just reflect them.
We need one more chart. The Hot 100 reflects a streaming universe with many influences, no central motor, and seemingly no shared experience. Airplay-only charts don’t have consumer-press currency right now and seem to reflect an increasingly isolated universe. I would like to see a new chart that combines radio and streaming, but in different proportions.
Finally, anybody who knows me knows that I’m not upset when great music resurfaces.
Songs I love have always had equal currency with me, even when they’re not current. I liked “Murder on the Dance Floor” the first time, and I never heard it enough on the radio to get sick of it.
I’m not unhappy that Kate Bush finally had a hit; I would have liked it even better if she had followed it with a brand new one.
I’m glad some content creators found a cover of “Misty” by Lesley Gore momentarily amusing. This one of hers is far better.
I find the current emphasis on interpolated hits exhausting, until there’s one as clever as Doja Cat sampling “Walk On By.” If you’re an artist who frequently turns to the past for inspiration, I’ll always think a little more favorably of you if we like some of the same records. But if you surprise me with something different, I’ll really respect you.
I own somewhere around 40,000 singles. If the new music pipeline got any worse, there are indeed plenty of them waiting to be rediscovered. But the shared experiences that we’ve had over the years need to continue. That’s particularly true of Song of the Summer. I’m already seeing a few candidates start to line up. (We’ll handicap them around May 23.) It’s time for radio and labels to conspire to make Summer 2024 a great one.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com