James Morrison must be watching Adele’s U.S. success with interest. He’s been in the stately retro-soul business since the international 2006 hit, “You Give Me Something.” Like Adele in her “Chasing Pavements” era, Morrison has found his U.S. footing mostly at Triple-A (with a little Hot AC airplay as well). But that might be changing.

It’s easy to say that Morrison and Adele both ended up at Triple-A because that’s where quality records go when there’s no other obvious home for them, but Triple-A understood retro-soul, partially because some prominent Triple-As were already making room for an occasional Al Green or Bill Withers oldie. And now, with the success of Fitz & the Tantrums, it’s an increasingly common sound there. In fact, the retro-soul sound has become a little easier to find everywhere in recent years.

Morrison, who might also be forgiven for thinking that The Script were impinging on his turf a little (their U.S. hits were more pop, but “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved” got them lumped in the same category at the outset), is in the U.K. airplay Top 5 this week with “I Won’t Let You Go.” In the U.S., he has moved to Universal Republic, and both the single and album, “The Awakening,” are now available here. So it will be interesting to see where a better market for what he does lands him this time out.

Morrison isn’t the only likely beneficiary of Adele’s success. And Adele is not retro-soul’s only benefactor. Last year, it was hard to imagine Fitz & the Tantrums’ “Money Grabber” as a Mainstream CHR hit, except, perhaps, in a better world. Then, Cee-Lo Green’s “F**k You (Forget You)” broke through and suddenly retro-soul was part of Mainstream CHR. All it took was a viral video that became a consumer press story, multiple TV syncs, and being worked twice over six months time. Now, there are new contenders from multiple disciplines (Lloyd’s “Dedication To My Ex,” Mayer Hawthorne’s “The Walk”) that have a better shot at some sort of pop airplay than they likely would have had a year ago.

I’m a fan of all these records, but I can’t ignore the irony. The original ’90s and ’00s “neo-soul” that helped start the ball rolling never got anywhere near Top 40 or even Triple-A, even though Erykah Badu’s “retro groove + contemporary references + edgy language” formula anticipated Amy Winehouse, Fitz, and Cee-Lo by more than a decade. These days, neo-soul has a hard time fighting its way past Urban AC. Only a phenomenal record like Maxwell’s “Pretty Wings” can elbow its way on to a Mainstream Urban station. And, of course, when Mainstream Top 40 wants to play an R&B record, Urban is the last place they look for it. Lil Wayne’s hard-to-classify “How To Love” is the only recent R&B ballad that Urban and CHR have shared, and it broke at both formats simultaneously.

There’s also an earlier group of retro-soul artists (Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Ryan Shaw) who got to this genre a few years ahead of everybody else, but without the edginess and the R-rated irony that seems to be pushing other records through to the mainstream. In fact, when the Dap Kings backed Amy Winehouse, replacing the reverence of their own albums with greater edginess, the result was Winehouse’s “Back To Black” breakthrough album.

Then there’s Raphael Saadiq’s 2008 “The Way I See It” and new “Stone Rollin’,” two of my favorite albums of the last few years. The first one edged any of its then-peers for capturing the feel of tough ’60s R&B, but with very contemporary sensibilities. “Stone Rollin’” does something even trickier, combining retro-R&B and neo-garage rock. One song has gotten some Urban AC play, another a few Triple-A spins. Mostly though, the industry reaction is like the album’s cover shot, an integrated crowd of ’60s teenagers watching Sadiiq play in what looks like a high-school gym—a few are captivated, others bemused or distracted or skeptical.

The ’60s R&B and garage rock that Saadiq hearkens back to was a major part of my musical education. Forty years later, the songs that didn’t become hits from those genres are still endless fodder not just for collectors, but now for TV/film music supervisors, Internet/satellite radio, retail music, etc. And yet part of the reason you’ve never heard so many of them is because there were so many other great records that did become hits. There is no less clichéd term available than “embarrassment of riches.” So if worthy music was left behind then, it’s going to be hard to get everything through the pipeline now.

Then there’s the question of how long that pipeline remains open. It would be nice to think that classic R&B can inform the current pop music language indefinitely, but I lived through the time in the ’70s when the ’40s-flavored “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Oh Babe What Would You Say” became hits, and then that era got put away for 35 years until Michael Bublé and the Rod Stewart standards albums. It is, if nothing else, encouraging that the first wave of first wave that gave us Winehouse’s “Rehab” and Duffy’s “Mercy” set up the phenomenally bigger Adele breakthrough, instead of saturating the market.