Many songs of the early MTV era (the '80s) were chart stiffs but are still remembered today because of the exposure their videos received on MTV. When those songs were current, their heaviest radio airplay was on AOR, not CHR.
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Let's watch everyone lose their minds. KRTH is playing...
- Thread starter michael hagerty
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If by big ones, it refers to songs that get positive results in testing, sure. But it’s not like they’re adding songs the audience is telling them “no” to just for the sake of adding them. People will burn out on some, seemingly never burn out on others, and some that weren’t monumental at the time will rise up for whatever reason (movie/TV use, etc).
If Uptown Funk is getting played, it’s testing well. If it continues to test well, it will keep a spot on the rotation.
The “it won’t stand the rest of time” predictions can be amusing. My parents said pretty much the same thing about anything I listened to in the ‘80s. And here we are, where I can probably expect at least 5 stations in town play Whitesnake.
I'm amazed at the number of times I've had to say these things on this forum. Here goes again:
- To the extent that they were reliable at all, chart numbers were a snapshot of record popularity at a given moment. Zero relevance to any other moment, including now.
- A peak position on the Hot 100 shows a given record's performance, relative to other records, on its best week. So a song that peaks at #15 is not a "Top 15 smash". It's a record that, on its best week, did less well than fourteen other records.
- Albums began outselling singles in 1969 (both were on an upward trajectory at that time).
- Singles sales peaked in 1974, and began a rapid decline following that. It took fewer sales to reach higher positions. Album sales continued to skyrocket until the end of that decade.
- Any attempt to assess the popularity (at the time) of records from 1974 on (at the latest) that doesn't factor in album sales is deeply flawed.
- Top 40 radio's troubles accelerated along with the decline of singles sales. As young adults found alternatives on FM, AM Top 40 stations were increasingly female-heavy and very young----8 to 24, rather than 18-34.
- Any attempt to assess the exposure of records via airplay that doesn't include MTV in the early-mid 80s and formats other than Top 40/CHR from 1974 on is deeply flawed.
And absolutely ZERO of the above tells you anything about the popularity of a given record today, which is all that matters.
That one was used on commercials.
A lot of number 1 hits are the ones that generally have prominence today, though. Uptown Funk was number 1 among multiple formats in 2014 and a lot of number 1s have staying power. Sometimes after decades, some fade, but only after a lot of airtime for years. I am guessing those are the ones that come to mind for programmers at least and music testers.
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I'm going to add some comments to your play-by-play of the charts.
And there were time when the whole chart was "thin" such as in the Christmas season when there were fewer releases and lesser sales. So a March or September chart is not the same as a December one.
And when there were few good releases, either by "luck" or the season, being #15 in a weak period might be the same as #90 in a strong release period. And in those weak times, perhaps only the top 5 or 6 songs might be truly meaningful.
And here we get into what the Drake organization called "turntable hits" where there were songs people loved to hear on the radio but did not ever go out to buy.
And that is what forced stations into developing "call-out" research toward the mid-70's because the old standards of singles sales and requests were no longer valid.
Further, as the multitude of FM signals jumped into the competitive environment, we started getting format fragmentation where Top 40 spawned progressive rock, AOR, Chicken Rock, AC, oldies and so on. So, if a record sold well, we did not know which format or formats it belonged on.
And by the beginning of the 80's, we discovered Auditorium Music Tests because so many successful format included or were based on non-current music. Even CHR stations did library tests for their gold selections.
And even then, we don't really know which partisan group was buying the album.
And that is why the FM Top 40's that lasted for a long time starting in the later 70's had a distinct adult approach. As an example, Bill Tanner's Y-100 morning show, "Tanner in the Morning", frequently interviewed Janet Reno, the Attorney General. Not a teen magnet person for sure.
And there were plenty of MTV and VH1 songs that were not hits, particularly ones with great videos but horrible music.
That is why, in music tests we always say, clearly, "score each song based on how much you'd like to hear that song today."
Music tests are purchased by stations, generally from a third party experienced provider. The station programmer or program staff decides on the test list, the company recruits candidates who listen to song hooks, and scores them.
The completed project returns to the station with each song scored by all kinds of criteria, such as age groups (like 25-33, 34-40 and 40-46 for Hot AC), gender, ethnicity, hours a week spent with radio, hours spent with your station, and esoteric things like sub-groups based on cluster / factor analysis.
Stations look at all the numbers in all the columns and decides the cut-off points that allow airplay. Then they decide what is playable and what is not and which rotations to put each song in.
And then, if you have a bunch of songs that are lower scoring on the younger station target demos (or among women but not men or other differences in subsets), you may "code" them in MusicMaster or Selector to never play close to each other and even limit them to, perhaps, one an hour or one per sweep.
Plus the fact that all of the charts at that time were based on human reporting by radio stations and record stores, rather than actual monitored airplay and bar-coded record sales. In other words, verifiable sources, which are what we have now. Bar-coding in record sales began at the end of the 80s, and monitored airplay began in the early 90s. So the statistics of music changed during that time. As a result, usually if someone talks about the popularity of music before then, they will say 'before Soundscan.'
Very, very important point.
Stores were often encouraged to report higher sales in exchange for a guarantee of full return credit on unsold copies or "freebies" of another song or album.
Radio station music decision makers were given incentives of all sorts to report songs at higher rotations or bigger chart moves. Coke, cash and cars could be had in the bigger markets.
All of that made charts enormously inaccurate. And that is why stations that understood this began doing callout in the mid-70's to accurately track their own listeners' music choices without having to refer to any charts at all.
Perhaps in this case Uptown Funk tested well with the demo the station was after.
If a major market station is playing it, you can be fairly certain that it tested adequately to be played. That should be obvious as major stations don't play songs that are not tested. Even stations in smaller groups do tests or they copy the MediaBase playlist from a nearby similar (but larger) market station that does test.
What is this weird obsession with that song now?
The record labels needed accurate information as well. There was some human monitoring being done by BMI for royalty purposes, so there was a market for some kind of automated monitoring that the labels would pay for in order to get accurate airplay information. That's what led to Mediabase and BDS.
It is the newest song on their playlist (2014). They skipped over a few other smash hits like Rolling in the Deep and some others to get to that one to add to their playlist.
Yet it was the labels that were trying to influence the charts by "rewarding" stations or programmers for hyping the charts. Heck, I've even had a record duck lay a humongous line right on my desk and pass me a straw! (He was hauled out by his collar and kicked, literally, out the front door!)
That practice didn't change with the arrival of monitoring. Just that they could document their expenses better.
Same thing with streaming and satellite.
And that is the essence of the sign I had in the PD's office at a #1 station I managed / consulted for 25 years:
"The record promoter is not your friend"
"The record promoter will do you harm".
The record promoters continued to call on us, but they were very careful. The policy helped us immeasurably... two and a half decades with twice the share of the #2 station in a 120 station market.
Everybody has self interest. Someone has to represent the music. That's the label's job. It's really their only purpose. Otherwise artists can release music themselves and keep all of the money.
Exactly. It is not that great of a song, even by today's (rather, ahem, low) standards.
It is the title of this thread, which is now almost 200 messages. The OP is sarcastic, implying that a classic hits station is committing a grievous error by playing an 8 year old song.
Last week, I was on a cruise ship where the median age of passengers seemed to be about mid-70’s. There’s a lot of live music for dancing, with different themes for each night. This night was “70’s night.” So the band, a group of young people from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, was playing ABBA, BeeGees, etc.
In the middle of 70’s night, some passenger went over to the band and requested “Uptown Funk.” So the band went ahead and played it. I recorded some of it below. People are dancing with their toddler grandchildren, waiters are walking around, the seniors are up and bogeying, everyone is happy. It’s an old-school sound. It could be 70’s, 80’s , whatever. It’s singable, danceable, etc.
It’s a sound that people like to hear. I’m not sure what the objection is to KRTH’s playing it.
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