It became the first song to be the most-added at five different formats in a single week. Top 40, AC, Hot AC, AAA and R&B.
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Adele’s ‘Easy On Me’ is the most-added song in radio history
- Thread starter xkxrx
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They're rushing to get it to #1 before all the AC stations flip to all-Christmas music.
I saw a magazine cover in the grocery store that says she has been through two years of torment. I'll let someone else add the obvious comment.
See all 5!! Wowie zowie!! 40 years ago that would've been 2 formats. And there were hundreds of crossovers. So?
Probably three formats, since AC had already splintered from Top 40 by 1981 and R&B had been a format for decades at that point.
I'm thinking of radio's heydays of the 50's/early 60s. A Top 40 stations could play anything ranging from Dave Brubeck - Perry Como- The Kingston Trio- Little Richard- Lawrence Welk- Sinatra to Gene Autry- Motown- various Frankie Avalon heart throbs and lol Pat Boone lol then throw in James Brown- Roger Miller- Johnny Cash- Chuck Berry AND The British Invasion
AC had splintered from Top 40 by the very early 70's, not 80's.
I was PD of WERC in Birmingham in 1972 and, while not the first, we transitioned from MOR to AC and played things like "Ben" and "The Morning After" and the like without the rock. There were a number of us who programmed that format and we often talked on the phone about playlists and talent. I was often in contact with Bill Tanner at WJDX in Jackson, MS, and there were quite a few other stations we looked at to see what songs were happening.
Even back then, there were AC's that were all pop like WERC and those that were mixes of traditional MOR with Andy Williams and Perry Como along with the more "normal sounding" of the Top 40 hits. So really, we had Hot AC and more traditional gold based AC with stuff going back to the 50s and a Barbra Streisand song tossed in to be more contemporary.
There were also gold based AC's like Lund's WGAR in Cleveland that had mostly AC ballads and medium tempo songs from the past with just a few more current songs. So maybe we could say there were three different AC formats by the mid-70's.
R&B had its origins in the later 40's as many larger markets with significant Black populations gave an opening for new formats. I worked at WJMO in Cleveland in the very late 50's as the station's "token whitie" and we followed the music on several dozen stations across the country.
And now we've come full circle. You've described WERT Van Wert, Ohio.
That's a duet with Chris Stapleton that's exclusive to country radio. Not sure if she had any say in the matter or if it was solely a record company thing.
It will probably still be #1 (or return to #1) after Christmas. After all, A.C. songs have shelf lives lasting for YEARS now. It won't be going away any time soon.
It took “Easy” FOUR weeks to top AC. It’s number one on its sixth week at Hot AC. That’s gotta be record for both charts, right (barring Xmas songs on AC)?
I just picked a random year/random issue -- Sept. 6, 1980 -- of Billboard, checked the AC chart and found Billy Joel's "Don't Ask Me Why" hitting No. 1 in its fifth week, so I have a feeling that another song, or multiple songs, must have climbed to the top in four weeks or less at some point in the chart's long history.
The No. 2 song, Dionne Warwick's "No Night So Long," was in its sixth week, and further down the chart, "Xanadu" (Olivia Newton-John) was already at 16 and "Jesse" (Carly Simon) at 18 in their fourth and third weeks, respectively. Charts were a lot more volatile before the SoundScan technology was introduced in the early '90s.
What was the last song that was a hit on 5 diff formats?
Even finding the last song to be a hit in FOUR formats would be difficult if AC and Hot AC hadn't become separate charts. Simultaneous success on Hot 100, AC, and R&B has been achieved many times, as has crossover prominence on Hot 100, AC and Country. But finding R&B/Country crossovers is very difficult, which means a lot of three-format crossovers, a few fours and ... other than this new Adele hit, I'm hard pressed to think of another possible five.
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