How Many Real Hits Are There?

On February 19 (2011) Kix Brooks' American Country Countdown cut the length of the show from four hours to three, dropping the venerable "Top 40" to 30.

In a trade press interview announcing the move, Bryan Switzer, Citadel Vice President of Programming and Distribution and a long time music promotion executive said the switch came at the request of the affiliates who "were uncomfortable with the level of unfamiliarity the songs in the 30s had on their stations."

"ACC Top 40" remains on the countdown's website, based as it is on Nielsen/BDS/Billboard monitored airplay, which lists 60.

Last week, when I asked a promotion executive what had happened in March to a song that she had been pursuing, she told me that one and six other tunes suddenly dropped off all monitored charts in a few weeks after Kix stopped counting down #31 to #40.

The self-evident veracity of that got me to scratching my head.

If the only thing that keeps some songs on the weekly countdown this week is the spins on last week's countdown, isn't it time to rethink what we're doing and why?

Are we countin' 'em down? Or, propping 'em up?

Is "The Dow Jones Of Pop" Music UP? Or, DOWN?

Chris Molanphy pens a great read that everyone who picks songs for radio airplay really needs to ponder.

"Like the Dow Jones Industrial Average — which signifies the health of the U.S. economy for millions of people who understand little about what the Dow means or how it works — the Hot 100 has been around long enough to become both a fixture and a shorthand for the current state of U.S. popular music."

I agree with him that "airplay-heavy charts are deadly. That’s the situation we had in the early 2000s, when iTunes hadn’t been invented yet and the labels had killed off the retail single."

Sadly, he needs to look deeper than his hypothesis of so-called "tyranny" that radio is "The Chief Executive" which undermines a good chart.

Too often it's promotional tactics manipulating radio in pursuit of album sales due to their higher profitability to the label which drives the chart and thus lacks "... checks and balances: the Congress that is the consumer.. (You also need a supply of good songs, obviously, but there’s not much a chart can do about that.)"

Stations (and labels) which ignore their own listener-driven research should not be surprised when the audience complains about too much repetition (aka too many songs I don't like) and looks to downloads for songs they simply like better than the chart hits being spun ad nauseam by radio in pursuit of #1 on the traditional trade magazine rankings.

Old habits are hard to break, but it's time we all rethink what we're doing and why.