A Tale Of Two Non-Hits

It boggles my mind to think how much this guy's backers have spent on airplane tickets, as he has conducted his "Hometown Radio Handshake Tour" in recent months.

What did he get for all that effort and money?

The song is not listed anywhere on either the Billboard Country Hot 60 or Country Aircheck chart this morning.  In fact, during the last seven days, one station played his song 11 times, two played it 8-9 times and six spun it 1 or 2 times.

What to make of that?

It takes more than money and lots of face-to-face contact with local programmers to get yourself a hit.

Frankly, that restores my faith a bit in what we do and how it all works.

Then, there's Callout America's #5 testing song today, Phil Vassar's "Don't Miss Your Life."

This one has to be very perplexing to Vassar and his promotion team, since it moves down from 34 to 35 on the Country Aircheck chart with no bullet and is nowhere to be seen now on Billboard's Hot 60, having moved backward sufficient weeks to be dropped.

Meanwhile, one-third of the monitored panels seems to be ignoring the chart malaise and playing it very heavily.  Four stations played it more than 35 times in the last week.  18 spun it 20 times or more in the last seven days and 19 more still have it in a ten+ spin category.

Obviously, in spite of the national inactivity, it has been working for at least a few stations.

Hats off to these smart programmers who went with their local listener reaction to what has proven to be a good national tester.

It's sad to see so many chart reporters going with the herd, feeding back to the charts what the charts are telling them are the hits.

Small wonder new things things move so slowly in the country format right now.