Five years ago, Mainstream and Rhythmic Top 40 broke roughly the same number of hit songs. Mainstream Top 40, not yet done with an eight-year streak of mass-appeal hit music, had 105 songs crack the top 20 that year. Rhythmic, usually known for being more musically aggressive, had only 103 top 20 songs, according to Nielsen BDSRadio. Unused to Mainstream Top 40 having the buzzier music, Rhythmic Top 40 relied heavily, for a while, on pop crossovers, while stations throughout the format sought to reposition themselves with the slugline “Hits and Hip-Hop.”
Now, it’s Rhythmic Top 40 and R&B/Hip-Hop that generate the musical excitement, as Mainstream Top 40 PDs grapple with what to do with “Sicko Mode.” And while “rise of Hip-Hop/marginalization of pop” has been a consumer-press story for more than a year, new data from Nielsen BDSRadio confirms Rhythmic Top 40 having returned to the new music lead, at least as reflected by the number of top 20 songs in the format last year (106). Hip-Hop/R&B is second, having charted 104 top 20 songs last year. Meanwhile, the number of top 20 hits at Mainstream Top 40 is down sharply: 105 in 2013, 96 in 2015, 87 last year.
The willingness to break records doesn’t necessarily track with ratings success — many programmers interpret “radio law” as suggesting just the opposite. Triple-A and Active Rock — two of radio’s most aggressive formats by this measurement — are also two of its most niche. But strong available product — typically manifesting itself as too many good songs for radio to choose from each week, and strong secondary titles that are good enough to be powers themselves — is traditionally an indicator of a healthy format.
The last time we looked at these numbers, Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2017 study had just shown radio slipping out of the top slot for music discovery — the punchline to an already-apparent trend line. (Last year’s Infinite Dial study didn’t even ask the music discovery question.) As that news landed, radio was aggressively imaging itself on the air around music discovery, but not necessarily taking other possible steps to engage for that image.
Since that time, the “No. 1 for new music discovery” stagers seem less frequent — or maybe they’re just becoming less noticeable. R&B and Rhythmic radio, propelled but not entirely driven by the availability of streaming Hip-Hop stories, have more product. Top 40 and Country, two formats that were engaged for young listeners with a rare simultaneous product boom five years ago, have both tightened considerably. Surprisingly, current-based rock formats all found more songs to play in 2018, despite ongoing complaints about a lack of product,
The current state of radio’s major formats is driven not just by product, of course, but by the ongoing migration of younger listening to streaming and a higher concentration of available quarter-hours among the older listeners who grew up more under broadcast radio’s sway. Streaming has focused younger listeners heavily around Hip-Hop, dispersing the mother/daughter coalition that drove the late ‘00s/early ‘10s golden age of pop. Here’s how the new music landscape looks on a format-by-format basis.
