Company News · July 11, 2006

What Is Top 40 Going To Do With Its Best Music In Years?

By Edison Research

As recently as April, I was reluctant to acknowledge a turnaround in the quality of Mainstream Top 40’s available product. There was a “Hips Don’t Lie” here, a “S.O.S.” there. But there was little uptempo pop/rock product beyond the usual teen punk. And there was also a preponderance of ballads, including several of the wimpiest AC crossovers in a long time. Top 40 was continuing its three-year journey away from Hip-Hop, but that didn’t mean it was finding anything compelling to replace it with.
Then Gnarls Barkley became a U.S. hit, the superstar releases started to roll out and 2006 began shaping up as the best Top 40 summer in nearly a decade. If it’s not quite the CHR-dominated summer of 1984 (“When Doves Cry,” “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” “Time After Time,” “Legs,” “The Reflex,” “Dancing In The Dark”), it’s certainly the best summer for tempo and variety since 1997 (“I’ll Be Missing You,” “Semi-Charmed Life,” “Men In Black,” “I Want You,” “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems,” “Quit Playing Games [With My Heart],” “How Bizarre”).
Best of all, instead of witnessing a retreat into pop balladry, the summer of 2006 bears another watermark of other great periods for Top 40: more songs that find the common ground between R&B and Rock, whether it’s Gnarls Barkley or Nelly Furtado. And if Gym Class Heroes have a hit-and starting with KIIS-FM L.A. is a pretty good indicator-we have our first Hip-Hop/emo (!) hybrid! And as with the Romantics and Stray Cats in 1983, there’s also music from Beyonce’ and Christina Aguilera that manages to be retro and contemporary at the same time.
And now the discussion must turn to, “How can Top 40 take advantage of all this mass-appeal uptempo product?”
For starters, every GM, PD and marketing director in the format should be giving some consideration to trying to be on TV this summer. If you have any sustaining belief in the power of television advertising (and the TV-driven success of Bob-FM, Jack-FM and friends should have restored it), it’s time to be in front of potential converts reminding them that Christina Aguilera, Beyonce’, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Justin Timberlake and Janet have current product, and making sure they know who Rihanna, Nelly Furtado, and Gnarls Barkley are. And in the summer, Top 40 has its best chance of having the medium to itself, something that also benefited the early Adult Hits outlets.
There should also be some thought given to quarter-year maintenance. Summer has historically been a good book for Top 40. Fall has not. With so much all-ages product currently available, PDs should give some thought to contesting that starts before Labor Day and carries adult listeners into the fall. (Or, for that matter, follows teens away from their summer jobs and back to their rooms, where they can go back to more solitary methods of finding their music.)
Finally, with so many places to hear old music in any given market these days, Top 40 needs to reestablish itself as the place to hear new music-particularly when there’s much new music worth hearing. Cumulus/Atlanta OM Rob Roberts, then the PD of WHYI (Y100) Miami, remarked in the late ’90s that you could tell when the current product was good because it was more compelling than any gold-based holiday-weekend feature. Five years ago, that wasn’t the case. But having heard a July 4th weekend full of retro product, one can confidently say now that the new music is better than “Ice Ice Baby.” (And wasn’t it scary when it wasn’t?)
And now, please post your thoughts on how to take advantage of the current strong Top 40 product.

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