MUSICAL MUSINGS
March 1, 2004
WHAT CAN THE CHARTS TEACH US?
It all started on Sunday, June 9, 1985. I was twelve years old, and I was listening intently to my local radio station, KZDX in Burley, Idaho, determined to tape every good song that came on the air. At 4:00, the opening fanfare of American Top 40 caught my attention. It hadn’t occurred to me before that a weekend countdown show would be a great way to record all my favorite songs in one fell swoop!
I started doing just that, but I began listening to more than just the music. Casey Kasem’s delivery captivated me, the way he rattled off chart statistics as if every hit song were printed on a baseball card. When he told me that “In My House” by the Mary Jane Girls had climbed to #7, I wondered if it would climb any higher next week. Or would it slip?
I listened on and off to the show for the next few weeks, becoming more and more intrigued. Sure, I’d taped all the songs I wanted for now, but I had another reason to listen: how were the songs performing? My favorite song at the time was “The Search Is Over” by Survivor, and it was climbing fast. Would it get to #1? It certainly deserved it.
On July 7, I came prepared with a form I’d created on my mom’s computer, numbered from 40 to 1 with blanks for title and artist. As the songs came on the air, I dutifully recorded their positions on the official Billboard chart. Already, I was learning the terminology: debut, biggest mover of the week, peak position, long-distance dedication. The next week, the real fun began: I knew the songs’ moves before Casey even announced them, just from hearing the opening notes of each song and comparing last week’s chart. I was upset when “The Search Is Over” peaked at #4, the same week that my little brother’s favorite song, “A View to a Kill,” went all the way to #1. I started to keep the charts in a ring binder. I showed them to my friends at school. Before long, I was the official pop music authority at East Minico Junior High.
And so it continued into high school, even after my family moved to St. Ignace, Michigan. I was dismayed to discover that my new local radio station, WKHQ in Charlevoix, ran part of the countdown while we were in church. But my parents were very patient. They let me bring my boom box to church each week to record the part of the show I was missing, and they even let me slip out during communion to flip the tape over.
Maybe some of you other radio geeks have similar stories. Something about American Top 40 captivated the pop music fans of our generation. But radio splintered in the ’90s, and there got to be too many “official” charts. Some very popular songs got too risqué for many radio stations—“The Humpty Dance” comes to mind—and American Top 40 stopped using Billboard’s Hot 100 as its source. I stopped listening to the show; I was in college by this time, and I could photocopy the chart from Billboard at the Olivet College library. In 1991, BDS and Soundscan started showing us actual sales and airplay, instead of reported sales and airplay, and Billboard started manually removing older songs in order to keep the charts fresh.
What are the charts like today? Well, there are more of them than ever before, although Radio & Records’ charts have come closest to achieving “official” status among radio programmers in the last decade or so. I’m still a Billboard man, myself; I log on to www.BDSRadio.com every day and let that data influence my programming decisions. But I’ve learned a few important things about the charts over the years, and they’re not all obvious to the casual chart watcher.
First and foremost, the charts exist to further the interests of record labels. If the charts were purely journalism—and I dream of a world where this is possible—we wouldn’t have rules for removing older songs. We wouldn’t have “Most Added.” We wouldn’t have such a staggering number of charts, each targeted to a tiny sliver of the total audience. We wouldn’t base the charts strictly on radio airplay, which is not directly influenced by actual music fans. The charts are more accurate now than ever before, considering their purpose: to help people make money.
Because the charts are a corporate tool, it’s important to look at their data in that light. All the authoritative publications now use recurrent rules to force older songs off the chart. For instance, songs that drop below #20 and have been around for 26 weeks are manually removed. But most of these disappearing songs are broken in, familiar-sounding, and well-loved; in fact, they’re probably the best-testing songs on your station. And in an era in which people listen to the radio less than they used to, many of your listeners still think of your recurrents as “new music.” On my custom Country panel, “Check Yes or No” by George Strait is literally #55 this week, but it was manually removed from the chart over eight years ago!
Meanwhile, the really new music is allowed onto the chart to fill the vacated positions, but very few people have heard these songs yet. Consciously, radio listeners may say they like to hear new music, but subconsciously, most of them don’t draw a distinction between an unfamiliar song and a bad song. Both new music and bad music deliver the same reaction: the hunt for a station playing a great, familiar song.
Furthermore, in some formats, some of the best-testing gold songs never made the upper reaches of the charts. At Hot AC, the top ’80s song this week is “I Melt with You” by Modern English, which peaked at #78. “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel only reached #26 in its first chart run; in its re-release a few years later, it got to #41. And many, many songs that were originally #1 records are songs no good research will advise you to play. “Macarena” was arguably the biggest pop hit of the ’90s, but would you dare play it in regular rotation? I hope not!
So the charts measure airplay, but they don’t necessarily provide good programming advice. Good programming comes from knowing your audience, knowing which songs to play and which not to play (regardless of chart performance), knowing how to rotate those songs well, and—more now than ever before—building an on-air image that transcends the music. In an era in which people load up mp3 players with their favorite songs, personality makes all the difference.
Radio needs to recapture the magic it has lost. Without Casey Kasem painting mental pictures for me, could I have found the charts as captivating as I did then and still do? Would I have developed a seemingly idle hobby into a career? Can radio continue to capture the imaginations of 12-year-olds on Sunday afternoons?