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Why must CHRs overplay songs?

Martin Mac said:
It seems like those songs stayed around on the charts so long due to there being either no recurrent rules or much more relaxed recurrent rules. However, I must say, their reign in the Top 20 was much longer than most songs today.

I don't think we will ever see a song today run on the charts that long due to today's songs on CHR being removed from the current chart after they fall below #15 if they've been on the chart for more than 20 weeks.
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Yes, because of the longevity in some of those records during that time, the rules were changed to prevent that from happening again. But I think we can both agree that "The Sign" had a longer lifespan as a current than say "Teenage Dream" or "California Gurls".

This was the closest apples to apples comparison that I could think of:

"The Sign": http://wweb.uta.edu/faculty/gghunt/charts/Songruns/Aceofbase/sign.htm (23 weeks in top 20; #1 for 9 weeks)
"California Gurls": http://wweb.uta.edu/faculty/gghunt/charts/Songruns/P/KatyPerry/californiagurls.htm (19 weeks in top 20; #1 for 7 weeks)

By the way, the record with the longest shelf life seems to be "Another Night": http://wweb.uta.edu/faculty/gghunt/charts/Songruns/R/realmccoyanother_night.htm

It spent 24 weeks in the top 10! Granted, as Atlantaboy mentioned, CHR needed to hang onto the available pop/dance product as much as possible. However, I don't think we will ever see a song stay in the top 10 for 24 weeks ever again. The spin count is too high and listeners attention span is too short these days.
 
wxman76 said:
By the way, the record with the longest shelf life seems to be "Another Night": http://wweb.uta.edu/faculty/gghunt/charts/Songruns/R/realmccoyanother_night.htm

It spent 24 weeks in the top 10! Granted, as Atlantaboy mentioned, CHR needed to hang onto the available pop/dance product as much as possible. However, I don't think we will ever see a song stay in the top 10 for 24 weeks ever again. The spin count is too high and listeners attention span is too short these days.
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We also gotta remember though, back in 1994-1995 power rotation on most stations was 60x a week - a 24-week Top 10 run with 60x a week power rotation is equivalent to a 12-week Top 10 run with 120x a week power rotation

Also, in regards to Run-Around and Breakfast At Tiffany's, a large part of the long chart run was due to the fact that these songs took 20+ weeks to climb into the Top 10 - so even with the new recurrent rules, they'd still have chart runs, in 2011 (hypothetically) of 30-35 weeks

Another good example is I'll Be by Edwin McCain, which I think took almost 30 weeks to climb into the Top 10, and ended up with a chart run of 40+ weeks
 
firepoint525 said:
No, I grew up in rural northwest Tennessee, but do tell about Cincinnati. I'm curious about this Q-102.
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Q-102 was known for a narrow playlist that burned recurrents even in the '80s before it was "cool" like it is now.

Granted, they weren't as bad then as stations are now, but by '80s standards, that was pretty bad.

That's why I thought WCLU or even Lexington's WLAP-FM were so much better.
 
Mike Joseph's Hot Hits format in the 80's had a power rotation of 1:10 to 1:15 for the top 5 songs! Medium and large market CHR's frequently had 2 hour rotations.
 
atlantaboy said:
^Do you guys know why power rotation was decreased so much in the 90s?
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Maybe that was when most CHR's had no idea what the hell they were going to do. They didn't know whether to lean towards hot AC, modern rock, rhythmic, or what.
 
NoWayNoCC said:
atlantaboy said:
^Do you guys know why power rotation was decreased so much in the 90s?
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Maybe that was when most CHR's had no idea what the hell they were going to do. They didn't know whether to lean towards hot AC, modern rock, rhythmic, or what.
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I mean, I guess it makes sense that if you lean adult, you decrease your power rotation so people will keep your station on all day at work

What doesn't make sense to me though is that there were CHRs in the 90s that still leaned rhythmic, yet their power rotation was in the 60-70x a week range, compared to the 90-120x a week range of both the 80s and today
 
Martin Mac said:
It seems like those songs stayed around on the charts so long due to there being either no recurrent rules or much more relaxed recurrent rules. However, I must say, their reign in the Top 20 was much longer than most songs today.

I don't think we will ever see a song today run on the charts that long due to today's songs on CHR being removed from the current chart after they fall below #15 if they've been on the chart for more than 20 weeks.
Click to expand...

Wasn't "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz a long, slow grower(76 weeks on Billboard's Hot 100)? And P!nk, didn't she have a single that took forrrrrrrever before it reached number one? The title eludes me...

...societally, we're a more ADHD culture, and aside from the "at-work" crowd, most people do not listen to a radio station longer than 20-30 minutes, so CHR has become the 'Headline News' of a pop music format.
 
I believe that this...
It seems like those songs stayed around on the charts so long due to there being either no recurrent rules or much more relaxed recurrent rules. However, I must say, their reign in the Top 20 was much longer than most songs today.
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is a better explanation than this...
the golden boy said:
I grew up in the 80s, but I can tell you that power rotations weren't as high then as it is now. Why? CHR was a mass-appeal format back then, meaning that you had a much larger pool of music to choose from. A larger variety= less spins.
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Reason being is that it has always been just the "top 40." We didn't play "more" music back then; we still had the highly limited playlists. It's just that they "turned over" more often then than now. Yeah, we burned songs to a crisp back then, too. ::)
 
Actually, back in the 80s there were plenty of CHRs that played up to 40 (or more!) currents at one time. Some of these currents were dayparted, and there definitely some "paper adds", but overall it was very common to find 35-40 current songs on a station's playlist. These songs received the majority of airplay time on these CHRs.
Additionally, the charts did indeed move faster. As such, in addition to playlists being bigger, rotations moved faster so if sampled a station in January and checked on it again two months later it oftentimes sounded very different.
CHRs, especially in the Top 50 markets, rarely played anything older than 2-3 years. This was especially true in the mid 80s when there was an over-abundance of Pop hits.
 
CHRles said:
CHRs, especially in the Top 50 markets, rarely played anything older than 2-3 years. This was especially true in the mid 80s when there was an over-abundance of Pop hits.
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Q-102 Cincinnati overplayed a lot of songs that were older than that though. Around 1989, they still kept playing "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago in middays. A lot.
 
Yup, Q-102 was known for being late on records, and for playing a lot of Recurrents in high rotation.
They didn't much competition to worry about, and usually commanded some pretty hefty numbers in the ratings. I believe they were also the first station station to give away a million dollars!
 
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