Report: More Songs Are Succeeding On Multiple Formats

Shaboozey (Credit: Daniel Prakopcy)

As labels push fewer songs to radio, veteran programmers believe it’s likely that more hit singles will be played heavily by multiple formats simultaneously. According to Billboard, this potentially makes individual formats less exclusive, but it also allows radio to flex what remains of its mass-market power in an era dominated by streaming. 

“Right now, we’re pretty desperate for hits that everyone agrees on,” says Matt Johnson, program director for WPLW, a top 40 station in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Streaming has changed how people consume music, and they’re not as siloed as they were 10 or 15 years ago. So if it’s a quality record, they tend to have a wider footprint across multiple formats.”

“When a song moves at the speed of TikTok, it’s almost like deliberately choosing to lose momentum by going to one format and then going to another two months later,” adds Sean Ross, author of the weekly Ross on Radio newsletter. Now, “It’s less about songs crossing from one format to another,” and more about songs “crossing from streaming to radio.”

Before the streaming era, some superstars promoted different singles to different formats, wooing Top 40 stations with straight-ahead pop, for example, but courting R&B radio with another sound altogether. It’s long been the case that singles that thrived at multiple formats typically grew at one before spilling over into the next. This sequential system for achieving airplay was partially driven by the way labels promoted tracks. “We were just following the patterns of the record labels,” says Tom Poleman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia.

Labels and radio used to have to wait for “callout research” — audience surveys that helped them determine if a song was eliciting an enthusiastic response or causing listeners to tune out. That process took weeks, if not months, according to Shulman: “You needed at least 100 to 150 spins on a record during the day” before a track’s merits could be judged accurately. It took time for a song to build enough momentum in one format that another would test it out.

Billboard reports many radio stations still look at those research reports. But while they’re waiting for them, they now have oodles of information to gauge audience demand — they can check streams and Shazams in their market on a daily basis. “We have more data at our fingertips,” Poleman says. “So if we see something really taking off, we think, why wait?”