RadioInsight

3 days ago | radioinsight.com | Sean Ross

What do Country stations’ most-played currents say about the format, particularly about the mix of callout-driven and streaming-driven titles that affect so much of the format’s alchemy now? Despite streaming’s undeniable impact, and its ability to create faster-breaking hits, power rotation still seems to show a greater influence from either more-traditional callout-driven hits or at least those driven by both indicators.

1 week ago | radioinsight.com | Sean Ross

The knives have been out for Ed Sheeran for a long time. He barely got to enjoy a few years of hits before the critics pounced. In 2018, the Grammys made their statement by overlooking “Shape of You” for Record of the Year to nominate “The Story of O.J.” by Jay-Z. Like Taylor Swift, there were already murmurs about Sheeran’s place at CHR by the time of his duets album in 2019.

2 weeks ago | radioinsight.com | Sean Ross

As recently as last year, the Summer Song derby was always good for artist comebacks, from Kid Rock to Enrique Iglesias to Hozier, eventually getting to the point where a song about summer doesn’t even have to be involved. Connie Francis, an unlikely comeback even by the standards of the TikTok era, has been propelled back into pop culture by an album obscurity, but she did have a summer hit about summer around the same time. Connie Francis’s “Vacation” was not the Summer Song of 1962.

3 weeks ago | radioinsight.com | Sean Ross

The wildly successful Adult Hits stations of the early ’00s — many of them still so — sometimes told listeners that they played “everything.” To the industry, however, they described themselves as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” They mostly combined the best of an Oldies/Classic Hits station and the list of a Hot AC. Any “oh wow” depth came mainly from the late ’70s and ’80s. Adult Hits stations were nevertheless wide enough to redefine what radio could do and still be considered well-programmed.

3 weeks ago | radioinsight.com | Sean Ross

A lot of the programming trends followed in Ross On Radio recently have to do with the modernization of the Classic Hits and Adult Contemporary formats. Veteran PD Jim Ryan successfully steered WLTW (Lite FM) New York to a more uptempo, contemporary approach that some didn’t think was possible in Mainstream AC. But at Classic Hits rival WCBS-FM, he successfully hewed to the ‘70s/’80s version of the format and a relatively wide playlist, different from what was happening elsewhere in the format.