The Lost Factor: Back To Year One

How quickly can the pop-music landscape change?

Consider the first six months of 1982. The first six months (or so) were Top 40 radio’s worst doldrums up to that time. The last six months were the beginning of a golden age of the format, filled with such still-unavoidable titles as “Eye of the Tiger” and “Jack and Diane.” The first six months have enduring songs, too, but they are also the time of “Pac-Man Fever” and “I’ve Never Been to Me.”

Four years ago, we started one of Ross On Radio’s most popular series of stories with a look at “The Lost Factor” of the hits of 1982. Specifically, we derived a formula for measuring those songs with the greatest trajectory between hits at the time (position on Billboard’s year-end chart) and obscurity now (number of airplay spins, or lack thereof). Early 1982 accounted for the bulk of the most “lost” songs then; now, it’s 14 out of the top 15 forgotten onetime favorites.

The Lost Factor began as a distraction for author and audience during COVID. With your encouragement, it eventually covered the years between 1960-2009. I chose that as an ending point just as the former Broadcast Data Systems (now Luminate) was leaving the business of monitoring radio, making further direct comparisons difficult.

Or so I thought. Occasionally, I would look at Mediabase, BDS’s competitor and now Billboard’s source of monitored airplay, and be surprised at how similar the numbers often were, despite a different panel of monitored radio stations. This week, as a holiday season gift to ROR readers, the Lost Factor returns to 1982, where it all began. And we have a new champion.

In my original look at 1982, the song with the highest Lost Factor was Buckner & Garcia’s “Pac-Man Fever,” which as the No. 42 song of the year (and thus 59 chart points) was now receiving no airplay at the BDS monitored panel. That gave it a Lost Factor of 59. “Pac-Man Fever” received no airplay at Mediabase stations last week, either. Its lost factor is still 59, but it has now been passed by three other songs.

On the week we initially examined, “Chariots of Fire” by Vangelis, the No. 12 song of 1982, had all of three spins, giving it a Lost Factor of 30, still considerable. This year, it received only one spin, raising its Lost Factor to 89. That would have put it just outside the top 10 on our all-time Lost Factor Top 100. Both the old champion (a novelty song) and the new (an instrumental) are from genres often likely to end up “lost.”

It’s important to point out that both BDS and Mediabase reflected or reflect primarily mainstream commercial outlets in the top 150 markets. They don’t include SiriusXM’s decade channels. You may recently have encountered “Chariots of Fire” on the ’80s at 8 channel, or in a retail establishment. It’s still “lost” to somebody whose ’80s listening is shaped mostly by today’s Classic Hits radio. And however radio’s influence might have changed, it still largely controls the agenda for which songs are remembered now.

Here are the new top 15 Lost Factor songs of 1982:

Vangelis, “Chariots of Fire” (2020 ranking #6, current LF 89)
Air Supply, “Sweet Dreams” (#4, 73)
Charlene, “I’ve Never Been to Me” (#5, 63)
Buckner & Garcia, “Pac-Man Fever” (#1, 59)
Roberta Flack, “Making Love” (#13, 55)
Diana Ross, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” (#19, 47)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, “Hooked on Classics” (#2, 45)
Karla Bonoff, “Personally” (#21, 41)
Juice Newton, “The Sweetest Thing (I’ve Ever Known)” (#25, 40)
Sheena Easton, “You Could Have Been With Me” (#15, 37)
Dan Fogelberg, “Leader of the Band” (#18, 33)
Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder, “Ebony and Ivory” (#23, 32)
Barbra Streisand, “Comin’ In and Out of Your Life” (#16, 27)
Elton John, “Empty Garden (Hey, Hey Johnny)” (#29, 25)
Paul McCartney, “Take It Away” (#9, 16)

With the exception of “Take It Away,” which first charted in July, the top 15 here are songs that came out in late 1981 but were part of the following year’s Billboard Top 100, or winter/spring 1982. They are thought of as the pre-MTV sound of pop music, although all of them actually became hits at a time that MTV existed, even if the channel wasn’t yet available everywhere or as influential as it would become quickly.

None of the top 15 songs received more than three monitored radio spins in the previous week. In some cases, there are big Lost Factor jumps due to losing a small number of spins. In 2020, a commenter asked how Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” could have been played even twice. Last week, it wasn’t played at all.

Even as somebody who enjoys coming across “lost” songs on Classic Hits radio, there aren’t a lot in the top 15 that I’m pining to hear again. “Pac-Man Fever” was a solid power-pop/bubblegum moment in the last year of “yacht rock” dominance. “Take It Away” was a return to form for McCartney after “Ebony and Ivory.” I love Sheena’s ballad inexplicably more than I like anything else from her first three years of MOR hits. I like Karla Bonoff, and I like the ’70s R&B artist Paul Kelly who wrote “Personally.” But reaction to “The Lost Factor” the first time made it clear that every song here will be someone’s favorite.

The original look at 1982 came with a footnote that affected two songs. Both “Through the Years” and “Love Will Turn You Around” had seemingly elevated spins as a result of Kenny Rogers’ death the week before. While both songs had more airplay in 2020 than they did last week, both have LF scores under 1.0 — meaning that they are still receiving a proportionate amount of airplay to their prominence at the time.

The inverse is that last week’s death of legendary artist/producer Quincy Jones led to a boost in airplay for “One Hundred Ways” (featuring James Ingram) that brought that song’s LF from 1.3 to 0.6. Donna Summer’s Jones-produced “Love Is in Control (Finger on the Trigger)” got enough spins to take it from a 42 LF to 6.0 — not quite out of the land of the lost.

In general, the Lost Factor formula (and the dividing line of 1.0) still works well with Mediabase data. In 2020, there were 44 songs that could be considered “lost” based on BDS data. This time, there are 45. (1982 was a year particularly robust in songs missing from the radio now, and I don’t doubt that will be the case even if this exercise moves on to include other years of the decade.)

The songs that became the most “lost” outside the top 15 were:

Diana Ross, “Mirror Mirror” (LF 2 to LF 15)
Elton John, “Blue Eyes” (LF 3 to LF 13)
Neil Diamond, “Yesterday’s Songs” (LF 2 to LF 12)
Lindsey Buckingham, “Trouble” (LF 2 to LF 6)
Paul Davis, “’65 Love Affair” (LF 2 to LF 6)

Songs that crossed the 1.0 threshold into becoming “lost” this year were America, “You Can Do Magic”; George Benson, “Turn Your Love Around”; and Willie Nelson, “Always on My Mind.” Besides “One Hundred Ways,” the only song that returned from being “lost” was “Love in the First Degree” by Alabama. Given that we’re dealing with songs that have crossed the 40-year-old mark since our first computations, it’s actually a surprisingly small list (although there are lots of songs below the 1.0 mark that you don’t regularly hear).

Finally, there are those songs that are the opposite of “lost.” The songs with the five lowest LF scores aren’t necessarily the songs that receive the most airplay, but the ones most played proportionately to where they ended up on 1982’s Top 100:

Stevie Nicks, “Edge of Seventeen” — she’s coming off a barrage of recent publicity, but her “Leather and Lace” was down
Loverboy, “Working for the Weekend” — punches above its weight because it was the #95 song of the year.
Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’” — it was the disproportionate airplay on this song (and the inverse for Olivia Newton-John’s much-bigger-at-the-time “Physical”) that helped prompt this story to begin with. In case you’re wondering, “Physical” saw a slight increase in LF from 2.9 to 3.7.
Van Halen, “(Oh) Pretty Woman”
Police, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”
A Flock of Seagulls, “I Ran (So Far Away)”
Joan Jett & Blackhearts, “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”
John [Cougar] Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane”
Stevie Wonder, “Do I Do” — the only one in the top 10 that gets the bulk of its 2024 spins from Adult R&B, not Classic Hits

I’m hoping to revisit the Lost Factor at least a time or two more. I’m inviting readers’ guidance on what they’d like to see next. Later years of the CHR boom such as 1983-85 may be more top-of-mind for readers, but the LFs are relatively low, because more songs are radio mainstays now. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

This story first appeared on radioinsight.com