One of the great things about Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” is that it reclaimed this year’s Thanksgiving road trip on behalf of Top 40 radio. car rides became SiriusXM’s Triple-A The Spectrum. There is zero tolerance in the car for anything loud/muddy. There’s no patience to hit the new station in any city just before the stopset and hear no music. So the song by which I remember this road trip should have been “I’m Just a Clown” by Charley Crockett.
Instead, our four-hour Thanksgiving rides belonged to “Anti-Hero.” It was new and fresh enough to enjoy five times over the weekend. It still gave that sense you rarely get from a road trip these days of an emerging big hit. It may seem strange to say about five weeks Billboard Hot 100 Hit No. 1 and a song that is already No. 3 in the Top 40 broadcast. But “Anti-Hero” is still a six-week-old song, and after road trips where “Heat Waves” and “Blinding Lights” sent me back to the Spectrum, Top 40 radio sentiment was fresher this time.
Listening to more Top 40, I got to hear a brand new song, “Eyes on You” by Nicky Youre, multiple times in the wild, another experience I haven’t had lately (but it’s already in power on SXM Hits1). It was also a victory lap for Meghan Trainor’s “Made You Look.” Four years ago, I loved Trainor’s “All the Ways,” which certainly sounded like the medium-fast pop hit Top 40 radio needed. never made it to CHR, which made me wonder if I still knew what the Top 40 needed. Then the surprise hit of 2022 became “I Ain’t Worried”, which has a similar feel.
It’s almost time for Ross on the radioThe “Songs That Made a Difference in 2022” article — not necessarily (or often) my favorite songs of the year, but the ones that steered a format or all of radio in a changing direction. But Meghan and Taylor allow for a number of different discussions this week, particularly when it comes to a certain controversial Hot 100 achievement. Making the Top 40 Road Trips Fun Again is only the beginning. Perhaps the saddest part of the early ’90s slump, when every market had a new Oldies FM but most had no Top 40s, was when the most heard song on a road trip was ” More Today Than Yesterday”.
In addition, Both Taylor and Meghan pulled off a rare feat. Trainor has returned to the faux ’50s sound of her breakthrough hits from eight years ago. Swift caught the attention of listeners two years ago in not trying to make radio recordings. A lot of Midnights is largely the work of someone who made Triple-A/Americana records for several years, but “Anti-Hero” proves that the old Taylor (or at least the mid-period Taylor) n had never really been killed.
Usually, by the time an artist is ready to be a crowd pleaser again, it’s too late. It only took George Michael a few years to create fun, upbeat records again, by which time his place in the Top 40 queue was entirely lost, at least in America. It took almost a decade for Alanis Morissette to return to the sound of “Jagged Little Pill”. Sting and David Byrne needed most of their adult careers. “Everybody’s Coming to My House” could have been a fun and funny radio song, but if Meghan Trainor wasn’t taken seriously in 2018, what chance had a Talking Heads-like sound? It is also interesting that Trainor kept herself in the public eye with hit Christmas singles, which is sometimes an acknowledgment that an artist does not expect to return to contemporary radio in any other way.
As with OneRepublic, there is evidence here that main acts from ten years ago are Top 40 main acts again. There are plenty of hit CHRs where Maroon 5’s “Beautiful Mistake” has managed to make the rotation because the 31-year-olds still consider them a top band. I’ve suggested before that the best Top 40 way to foster a new mother/daughter coalition is to make adults happy enough in the car again to maybe lure their kids under the earbuds. The other adult on my particular road trip was ready to leave the Top 40 around this time. “Hey, the music is pretty good now” might take a few more turns.
“Anti-Hero” is Taylor’s first consensus power in about six years, and we should be glad she wants one. After a decade of viral hits, from “Gangnam Style” to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” I’m still watching to see if labels still see any benefit in going to the Radio Top 40. In 2022, Bad Bunny had no motivation to prepare a record for English-speaking CHR. Sending a reworked 10-minute album cut to No. 1 could have removed Swift’s impulse to make a radio hit. But his Hot 100 release week of Top 10 domination still included radio participation, even though streams alone would have done the job. And while we think about what a hit is these days, “Anti-Hero” is still more of a hit than “Cardigan” or “Willow” to me.
One thing that has become clear in this discussion is that the ability to land at No. 1 on the Hot 100 immediately changed readers’ perception of radio timing. With “As It Was” and “Anti-Hero” by Harry Styles, I heard friends who thought the radio was initially skeptical of both songs. In fact, songs that reached #1 in just seven weeks were considered phenomenal in the 70s or 80s. Perhaps the lesson is that the Top 40 needs a “new powerhouse” category that barely differs of “power” (New York’s Z100 briefly tried), but the radio didn’t fight either song. Radio has beenbriefly, cautious with “About Damn Time”, but even that was a reasonably direct ascent.
Ironically, even some readers who do believe Week 1’s Hot 100s should be in immediate rotation were still upset to see Swift occupy the top 10 and, in doing so, eclipse the Beatles’ top 5 dominance of 1964. “Can you speak to all the elders from a ledge about… their ‘pure’ cards?” asked a tag reader. “Do these people have any idea what the 80s charts were like?”
As an elder, I remember very well what Billboard the charts were like at various times in the mid 70s and again in the late 70s/early 80s. At that time I was comparing Billboard with the much more transparent diffusion tables in Radio & Records, and I was aware that some songs couldn’t get enough sales to be #37 with just eight radio stations. I’ve always been able to accept these moments as bad referee calls – they inform the standings, but don’t invalidate them. I also learned from Saturday American Top 40 Twitter thread that people view any song they don’t know, or just don’t like, as an obvious product of shenanigans.
The Hot 100 is no longer the one we hear counting down on Saturday morning. I now consider it the Meta 100, bringing together many disparate stories into an overall picture that is absolutely relevant if you’re an artist, A&R person, or chart manager, but still doesn’t guarantee that a song will be experienced by the majority of music consumers as a hit . I find myself wishing there was a second graphic, drawn more closely around the world of radio. In some ways this was attempted by Billboard‘s Pop 100 from the 2000s, but I don’t want it to be so tight.
The Hot 100 chart that I would find most useful is one that uses most of the same inputs now – of course, radio folks should want to know what songs are streaming – but weights them differently. I wish streaming had about the same weight to broadcast as sales did in the 70s, informing but not broadcasting. There are pure airplay charts of course, but unless the radio shows more music business again, I need some outside input to help me find hits.
Wanting the world of radio to always define what hits are may seem like a gift that radio no longer earns. I think having another more radio driven chart would be a more accurate indicator of “common denominator hits” as understood by most people. Leading the metaverse and having success that everyone knows are increasingly two different things. I would like to see both. Just as we watched songs “crossover” between formats in our youth, having both charts would allow more songs to develop more stories and crossover between streaming and radio.
A chart with the radio as the engine would be more useful if the radio broke more music, or receive more music from labels to smash. Thanksgiving weekend reinforced that the Top 40 is most exciting when things go faster. As the oddities drift off the stream and then attempt to continue a radio story until the search can kick off, I found myself increasingly thinking that it would be very good for these songs to peak at No. 13. I don’t necessarily want another eight of weeks with these songs as they struggle from #13 to #8; I want new songs. The trick is to make it a viable model for labels and radio.
