In many ways, Taylor Swift's "Back To December," seemed to be the confirmation that her place in Country radio was less of an ongoing concern for program directors. With a rapid ascent, by Country standards, to No. 1 and, by programmers’ accounts, positive callout and MScores, it was the sort of straight-ahead applicable-to-all-ages lyric that PDs had waited for. If the appeal of “You Belong With Me” pleasantly surprised PDs, this one barely rated discussion.

And yet in the Country P1 survey unveiled at Country Radio Seminar last week, Swift was noticeably absent from the list of respondents’ top 10 artists. Swift could keep listeners tuned in. She could open with a million albums in her first week in today’s brutal climate for record sales. But she couldn’t get the nod from this group of Country P1s, even when the discussion was only between them and their computer.

So does the gap between what listeners like and what they admit to liking matter anymore, aside perhaps from choosing what artist goes in the TV spot? There are fewer cases where it’s even an issue now. The CHR chart is full of artists who defied a traditional career trajectory—Eminem, Train, Diddy, Usher, Enrique Iglesias, Nelly, and, most recently, Jennifer Lopez all turned out to be just one song away from the radio again. Iglesias, in particular, seems to have amassed a following with listeners who weren’t even born at the time of “Bailamos.”

That’s a marked change from previous eras where there was always one polarizing artist—Barry Manilow, Michael Bolton, Celine Dion—who ultimately changed their sound and made hipper-sounding records, but to no avail. In several cases, the lesson has been that what it takes to galvanize the audience again is the enthusiasm of a new label. Callout, and its eventual tilt toward active songs, also seemed to change the nature of what got through the pipeline—both in terms of songs and artists. As has been noted before, acts like Lady Gaga are refreshingly guilt-free pleasures today and it’s the ballads that once represented “quality music” to PDs that often struggle.

So far, the spread of PPM, and with it, the spread of MScore, also seems to have defanged the issue of what listeners will admit to liking. The resurgence of Chris Brown—one artist of recent years whose issues were attributable to something more than mediocre records—comes as listener acceptance becomes more quantifiable. (And, as it happens, as he makes his best records in several years.)

One also wonders now what would have happened if the ultimate artist image issue—the Dixie Chicks—were taking place now. Having started in the research business shortly after the controversy began, there was, indeed, measurable antipathy that made it clear that the hostile calls to radio stations about the Chicks weren’t merely an organized calling campaign or coming from people outside the format.

But would the group’s backlash have translated to enough people actually tuning out the Dixie Chicks to make them untenable for a given radio station? Is it possible that even those listeners who felt the need to express their anger might actually have left the radio on? With MScore, it’s a question that can be measured more extensively than it could in 2003.

Today, the one Chicks song that continues to get meaningful airplay, “Cowboy Take Me Away,” does perform well in MScore. That said, its chances are pretty good because traditional music testing over the years has isolated those markets where the song would still be playable. Like the songs in the pre-Soundscan/BDS era that would have almost certainly done better (e.g., “Super Freak”), the historical record can’t be changed. But chances are that more test cases will follow.