Do kids really like oldies?

[K.M. Richards]

It depends. Kate Bush got a hell of a lot of airplay out of her "blip".

Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ Is Already a 2022 Sales and Streaming Smash — Will It Take Over Radio Too?

After becoming a global hits thanks to its 'Stranger Things' usage, radio programmers are adding Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill."

www.billboard.com

While my friend Mike beat me to pointing out the difference between TikTok and Netflix, I would also add that the ongoing impact is minimal.

Last week it was down to a whopping five spins across the Mediabase entire monitored Classic Hits panel, as stations dropped it after its peak on the charts in 2022. And it's only slightly above normal as it has returned to gold rotation in the Alternative station base, with 55 spins last week (and I expect some of that is "recurrent" play although those are not broken out from the total).

However, that revived interest did result in something that did not happen when the song was first included on the "Hounds Of Love" album in 1995 ... it was released as a single for the first time, after 37 years.

Now, in the interest of not comparing apples and oranges, please cite an example of this magnitude where social media -- not one of the most popular streaming television services -- was the driving force.

 

[K.M. Richards]

That is easily the best version I've heard.

Better than the Macarena!

 

[K.M. Richards]

However, that revived interest did result in something that did not happen when the song was first included on the "Hounds Of Love" album in 1995 ... it was released as a single for the first time, after 37 years.

Correcting the obvious typo (too late for me to edit the original): The Kate Bush album was released in 1985.

 

[kevtronics]

Now, in the interest of not comparing apples and oranges, please cite an example of this magnitude where social media -- not one of the most popular streaming television services -- was the driving force.

Here's one from 2006:

Homemade ‘Noodle’ Dance Spawns YouTube, Radio Hit

Chicken noodle soup used to be Campbell's pride, but now it's much more popular because of the Harlem, N.Y., song and dance craze Youtube.com recently made famous.

www.billboard.com

Enuff began playing the song on his radio mix show in June. By July other urban stations like WHTA Atlanta and KKDA Houston picked up the track. Now "Chicken Noodle Soup" has garnered 1,086 spins nationally and is No. 41 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Its steady rise up the chart is also directly linked to the YouTube dance frenzy the song inspired.

Social media also gave us Justin Bieber... for better or worse.

 

[CTListener]

Here's one from 2006:

Homemade ‘Noodle’ Dance Spawns YouTube, Radio Hit

Chicken noodle soup used to be Campbell's pride, but now it's much more popular because of the Harlem, N.Y., song and dance craze Youtube.com recently made famous.

www.billboard.com

Social media also gave us Justin Bieber... for better or worse.

MySpace got Colbie Caillat her initial following. Of course, her dad is a record industry insider (produced Fleetwood Mac), so her rise wasn't completely organic. It might be argued that she was born on third base and thought she'd hit a triple, but she was the first MySpace success story I recall hearing about.

 

[michael hagerty]

Okay, but now we’re talking about new artists whose first exposure is TikTok or other socials.
The topic is oldies and

Here's one from 2006:

Homemade ‘Noodle’ Dance Spawns YouTube, Radio Hit

Chicken noodle soup used to be Campbell's pride, but now it's much more popular because of the Harlem, N.Y., song and dance craze Youtube.com recently made famous.

www.billboard.com

Social media also gave us Justin Bieber... for better or worse.

K.M's question was in the context of social media being the driving force behind making an old song a hit again ---you brought up Connie Francis' "Pretty Little Baby"----and the topic is "Do kids like oldies?"

"Noodle Dance" and Colbie are songs from new artists that got their first exposure via social media---a very different (and now very common) thing.

 

[CTListener]

Pat St. John, on his SiriusXM show on the 60s Gold channel yesterday, remarked after playing the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup" that he gets requests from kids (plural) for that song "all the time" during his live Saturday night request show.

Well, that settles the original question once and for all! There are at least two kids out there who really love oldies!

 

[kevtronics]

Pat St. John, on his SiriusXM show on the 60s Gold channel yesterday, remarked after playing the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup" that he gets requests from kids (plural) for that song "all the time" during his live Saturday night request show.

There's a TikTok meme using it:

TikTok - Make Your Day

 

[K.M. Richards]

Pat St. John, on his SiriusXM show on the 60s Gold channel yesterday, remarked after playing the Foundations' "Build Me Up Buttercup" that he gets requests from kids (plural) for that song "all the time" during his live Saturday night request show.

There's a TikTok meme using it:

TikTok - Make Your Day

Which means it is subject to the usual short attention span of memes and is therefore anecdotal in nature rather than "proof" of anything.

 

[kevtronics]

Which means it is subject to the usual short attention span of memes and is therefore anecdotal in nature rather than "proof" of anything.

Listener testing (if any is done) will determine if enough people within the target demographic still want to hear it even after the social media meme has passed.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Listener testing (if any is done) will determine if enough people within the target demographic still want to hear it even after the social media meme has passed.

True, but in the case of a 1968 oldie which hit #3 as a current, the odds of it getting enough positive response in testing to warrant much more airplay than it already does (right now, pretty much just AM stations with Oldies formats getting low ratings) are very slim.

 

[TexasTom]

For the moment, the 80's seems to have the highest amount of music that attracts wide demographics. How long will that last? I don't know, but it sure seems to have exceeded the longevity that many expected. For all I know, Classic Hits focused on that decade may be the last surviving format for radio as a whole. I just hold on tight (hey, that was an 80's hit, too!) and ride it out.

What I wonder is what will happen when that 80s music ages out -- as it inevitably will.

Here in Dallas/Fort Worth, we've had some variant of oldies or classic hits on 98.7 for about 40 years -- first as K-Love, now as "The Spot". It started out with 50s & 60s oldies then eventually evolved as an oldies stations to 60s & 70s. Once the 60s music mostly disappeared and they were 70s and 80s, they started calling it classic hits instead of oldies, but through all of those transitions the ratings have seemed to be pretty steady. Even adding a limited amount of 90s music to a format centered on the 80s (and with some 70s songs still getting played) seemed to hold steady on overall ratings, but I guess the demographic breakdown wasn't so great as they have recently put in a bunch more 90s and early 2000s music and have started venturing into playing rap from that era (after generally ignoring most of the rap that had appeared at the end of the 80s). And the ratings have sunk.

Maybe it is just going to take time for the people who want to hear "Hypnotize" by Notorious B.I.G. and various Eminem tracks on a classic hits station to find the station and start listening. If so, the ratings might yet recover. But my memories of Top 40/CHR radio in the 90s make me a bit skeptical, because this was the era when the split between "mainstream" and "rhythmic" CHR really solidified. In the Radio & Records charts, even after that split it became very, very rare for a song on the "mainstream" chart to reach such a consensus level that every reporting station played that song. So finding those universal songs that appeal to a wide range of listeners is going to get harder and harder as classic hits stations are forced to move deeper into the nineties. If that's the case, classic hits could become one more of those formats that struggles to break out of the two-share range.

 

[michael hagerty]

What I wonder is what will happen when that 80s music ages out -- as it inevitably will.

Here in Dallas/Fort Worth, we've had some variant of oldies or classic hits on 98.7 for about 40 years -- first as K-Love, now as "The Spot". It started out with 50s & 60s oldies then eventually evolved as an oldies stations to 60s & 70s. Once the 60s music mostly disappeared and they were 70s and 80s, they started calling it classic hits instead of oldies, but through all of those transitions the ratings have seemed to be pretty steady. Even adding a limited amount of 90s music to a format centered on the 80s (and with some 70s songs still getting played) seemed to hold steady on overall ratings, but I guess the demographic breakdown wasn't so great as they have recently put in a bunch more 90s and early 2000s music and have started venturing into playing rap from that era (after generally ignoring most of the rap that had appeared at the end of the 80s). And the ratings have sunk.

Maybe it is just going to take time for the people who want to hear "Hypnotize" by Notorious B.I.G. and various Eminem tracks on a classic hits station to find the station and start listening. If so, the ratings might yet recover. But my memories of Top 40/CHR radio in the 90s make me a bit skeptical, because this was the era when the split between "mainstream" and "rhythmic" CHR really solidified. In the Radio & Records charts, even after that split it became very, very rare for a song on the "mainstream" chart to reach such a consensus level that every reporting station played that song. So finding those universal songs that appeal to a wide range of listeners is going to get harder and harder as classic hits stations are forced to move deeper into the nineties. If that's the case, classic hits could become one more of those formats that struggles to break out of the two-share range.

90s music will age in.

What the "mainstream" charts did a lousy job of reflecting was that "mainstream" had slid into irrelevance for people in their teens and 20s at that time.

20 years ago on this board, there were people saying 70s music was doomed because it was both the Partridge Family and Pink Floyd. Radio figured it out, did it, made money from it and is now (largely) past it.

 

[TexasTom]

90s music will age in.

What the "mainstream" charts did a lousy job of reflecting was that "mainstream" had slid into irrelevance for people in their teens and 20s at that time.

20 years ago on this board, there were people saying 70s music was doomed because it was both the Partridge Family and Pink Floyd. Radio figured it out, did it, made money from it and is now (largely) past it.

I do remember that debate and it may well be so. But the question that I'll ask is how the actual split of Top 40/CHR into two separate formats (mainstream and rhythmic) might make that harder. It does seem that classic hits programmers are going to have to choose which side of that split to follow since the number of songs that managed to be big hits of both sides of that split were pretty low.

 

[michael hagerty]

I do remember that debate and it may well be so. But the question that I'll ask is how the actual split of Top 40/CHR into two separate formats (mainstream and rhythmic) might make that harder. It does seem that classic hits programmers are going to have to choose which side of that split to follow since the number of songs that managed to be big hits of both sides of that split were pretty low.

Tom, those of us not in the demo (in other words, too old for when the shift happened) way underestimate the impact of rhythmic among adults who were teens and young adults then. Especially women:

Sandra's 60.

As to which to follow, which way did the culture itself go? That's the direction the format will go.

The Tonight Show closes every night with this, not Doc Severinsen, and has for 11 years:

 

[kevtronics]

90s music will age in.

A lot of '80s music sucked. But older people have forgotten the bad stuff, and younger people never heard it in the first place.

It's taking longer for that to happen with '90s music.

 

[michael hagerty]

A lot of '80s music sucked. But older people have forgotten the bad stuff, and younger people never heard it in the first place.

It's taking longer for that to happen with '90s music.

Is it, though? Are we further behind with 90s than we were with 80s in 2015? I dunno.

There's no culture problem. Snoop Dogg is doing T-Mobile commercials.

 

[K.M. Richards]

A lot of '80s music sucked. But older people have forgotten the bad stuff, and younger people never heard it in the first place.

I believe your bias against that decade's music is showing a bit too strongly there.

Somehow, we as programmers managed to find enough songs that didn't "suck" to have sustained the Classic Hits format for a couple of decades now. As Mike has said (and so have I, lots of times) it's all about finding the songs that listeners want to still here, and then playing those. And there are songs that I play on The Eighties Channel™ which were only mid-charters as currents ... and a whole lot of #1s that I don't play at all.

Once again, if you have the research and a programmer who knows how to properly interpret same, you'll find all the songs from that decade that work. (And judging from what KRKE's owner tells me, the ad revenue isn't sucking, so we must be doing something right.)

 

[kevtronics]

I believe your bias against that decade's music is showing a bit too strongly there.

Not the entire decade. Really just the last few years of it. And people already knew it at the time, because radio stations and record companies started re-releasing music from the early '80s (or even older) to make up for the lack of quality new music.

This is the kind of crap that got into the Top 20 in the late '80s, and which you've absolutely never heard played again since then:

 

[michael hagerty]

This is the kind of crap that got into the Top 20 in the late '80s, and which you've absolutely never heard played again since then:

Yeah. Because it stalled at #20 thirty-eight years ago and the same group has a #3 hit you can play instead.

My rule of thumb: The word "hit" shouldn't be used outside the top 15, and there are records that peaked between 11 and 14 that weren't really hits, either. It's how the charts were designed. A record didn't climb in a linear fashion to a cumulative number. It's how many copies it moved in a given week compared to every other record selling at that time.

In a week with stronger material, "Pop Goes the World" probably wouldn't have cracked #30. In a week with weaker stuff, it might have gone Top 10. All relative.