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Items Tagged With: “top 40”
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When Fifteen Months Is A Whole Career
So what will One Direction's U.S. career be in fifteen months?
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How To Sell CHR Discovery
Incredibly, it's only been in the last year or so that broadcasters really picked up on the potential of "new music discovery" as a national franchise. New music may be perceived as harder to program in the context of today's major-market PPM-measured CHR, but it's a natural offering when you can target every person nationally who has a voracious a…
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For Some Songs, Too Much Too Soon?
When Rihanna's "We Found Love" came out, it was almost instantly recognizable as a smash--the sort of record that could go instantly into "power new" (or whatever a Top 40 station's accelerated new music category was called) and then quickly into power rotation, waiting only for adults to get used to its monster electro-power-chords. So when the ar…
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A Breakthrough For Alternative… Pop
An interesting recent comment from longtime friend of ROR and Billboard Top 40 Update columnist Rich Appel. While a lot has been made recently about the return of “Alternative Rock” crossover to the Top 40 chart, it’s hinging heavily on two records, Fun’s “We Are Young” and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know.” It’s true that bo…
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The Real Curators Of Radio
It’s a familiar trope in the broadcast owner’s argument about what constitutes “radio”: Radio is companionship. Radio is produced entertainment.
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Teen Pop Parties Like It's 1999
Perhaps the best illustration of how One Direction mania has taken hold in North America was last week at Canadian Music Week in Toronto. Sony Canada director of national promotion Warren Copnick was in line at a nearby Tim Hortons coffee shop when a promotion person from another label came up to double-check that his daughter was on the guest list…
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CHR and the End of Crossover?
In the late-’90s/early-’00s, when CHR was as healthy as it had been in fifteen years, the trade publication Airplay Monitor regularly tracked the CHR product to see where songs had come from—measured in terms of which format a song had charted first. During those years, marked by the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync and other acts that were marquee names f…
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Throwback Listen: Steve Rivers’ WZOU Boston, 1990
Steve Rivers always liked to express his programming philosophy as “just play the hits.” There was, of course, more to it than that—the answer always reflected both characteristic modesty and perhaps some competitive protectiveness. And Rivers’ WZOU Boston was actually one of a number of late ’80s/early ’90s stations that aggressively sough…
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Time For An End To CHR Envy?
There was a telling moment at the Feb. 24 Country Radio Seminar panel, “Are These Country People Freaking Nuts?” After hearing four recently arrived PDs from the pop world describe their bafflement with certain format practices, most of them chart-related, Warner Music Nashville’s Chris Stacey praised the PDs for their willingness to step out o…
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Pop PDs’ Adventures In Country
For most AC readers, it’s hard to imagine a format where last week’s No. 1 song is no longer among their most played.
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Final Listen: WABB
WABB Mobile, Ala., doesn’t quite go all the way back to the beginning of the rock era as a Top 40 station. As we discovered while researching the CHR format’s longest running stations last year, there was a period where WABB-AM had dropped Top 40 and WABB-FM had not yet segued away from AOR.
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First Listen: CBC Music’s Pop 40 and ’70s Channels
Every now and then, I’ve found myself wondering what it would sound like if NPR Music decided to offer a Top 40 channel. Noncomm broadcasters around the world offer different versions of CHR that are sometimes straightforward and sometime the hip variant on the format that you wish existed in the U.S.
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Whitney Houston: A Musical Appreciation
Throughout her recording career, Whitney Houston often bounced between two types of songs. Those that had been hits for somebody else and seemed untouchable, and those that seemingly became hits only because she was the one singing them.
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MDNA: 53 Is The New 42
Time for another ROR “instant request.”TargetSpot/Ronning Lipset Radio co-founder Andy Lipset writes, "Madonna’s performance at the Super Bowl and then subsequently hearing her new single on [WHTZ] Z100 and WKTU [New York] this weekend had me thinking. My own research (kids, wife, neighbors, co-workers, social networks, etc.) all show that “Give Me…
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Ross On Records: Hip-Hop Racks Up The Hits
For several years, one of the key indicators that Hip-Hop was no longer the only music that mattered to any self-respecting 17-year-old was that it was no longer selling without Top 40 airplay—and not so much with it, either. That represented a sea-change for Hip-Hop, and R&B before it, which had been able to unleash one stealth hit after another s…
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Could “At Last” Be A Hit Today? It Already Is
This article was written in February, 2011, in response to an NPR feature on Etta James' "At Last" and the state of current songwriting that had run several weeks earlier. As fans and industryites mourn James, who died Jan.
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Songs That Made A Difference In 2011
The story of 2011’s breakthrough records may not be those that moved radio forward, but those that slowed it down. Programmer-turned-Episcopalian minister Josh Hosler clocked the tempo of Top 40 last year and found that, depending on how you looked at it, 2011 might be the most relentlessly uptempo year ever.
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2011’s Most Influential Songs From a Listener’s Perspective
Editor’s note: Ross On Radio reader Tom Smith responded to a call in last year’s final column for feedback on influential songs of 2011. Instead of a few titles, I got the sort of comprehensive and thought-provoking essay that deserved to be read on its own.—Sean Ross“We Found Love,” Rihanna featuring Calvin Harris – By now it is pretty obvious tha…
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Ross On Radio: The Local Hit Lives
One of my best radio moments of the last few weeks involved Hip-Hop/R&B KMEL San Francisco and its top 6 at 6 p.m. countdown.
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Is Hot AC's Balance Shifting Again?
A year ago, the CHR success of “Turbo-Pop” and an ever increasing amount of Rhythmic Pop lured Hot AC closer to Mainstream Top 40’s orbit. Now, there are signs of the Adult Top 40 format moving back to its traditional pop/rock/singer-songwriter sound of the last 15 years.
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