• Music Cycle 2023 Year Four Of The Doldrums And How We Got Here (Part 3)

  February 1, 2023

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• This week All Access presents the final installment of Guy Zapoleon’s Music Cycle 2023 article. In Part 3, in addition to a deep dive explaining the depth of the Doldrums, he offers suggestions for both radio and record companies about how to right their respective ships.
• Decline Of Consensus Hits

  Radio and the Top 40 format have lost the long time #1 position as the gatekeeper of the music discovery where the hits start, also radio has lost the large amount of listening from passionate music fans looking for music discovery. Now that's #1 position belongs to Streaming platforms and apps

  The factor that has built hits in the past, a consensus of agreement on the most popular songs due to exposure by radio (and especially Top 40 radio). Radio has lost its gatekeeper crown and there are multiple streaming platforms (and their playlists ) and TikTok as well as radio to hear the songs. The challenge is that the star making platforms that expose music are no longer at ONE CONSENSUS destination. For 55 years Top 40 radio as a whole picked up on 90% of the same hit music - when a song reached CRITICAL MASS with a huge number of listeners after it was high on the Billboard Charts and in POWER ROTATION at the same time across the country by these Top 40 stations it became a massive hit almost automatically. Those days are gone.

  So, it’s so incredibly hard to build consensus because the share of ears is spread across so many platforms streaming, apps, satellite, and of course, radio. And because with all these media platforms it’s hard to build consensus around one song and even building hits and hit artists, and that journey to the top can take a long time.

  Some of this effect and loss of control of the starting the hits is reflected where we see less and less super hit titles - what I call consensus A’s, which are a majority of top 40 stations play as powers. Those numbers have shrunk every year, dropping dramatically from the number we have 5-10 years ago where this is the lowest amount of these major hits in history.

  

  That also means the biggest hits are staying on longer, slowing all the other songs in rotation. When a song or album becomes a hit, they stay on the Billboard and Mediabase spin charts or Streaming charts even longer leaving much less room for new music and new artists.

  There are a number of different ways hit songs start today:

  1. A hit today can come from massive streams that a superstar artist dropping a song receives because it’s immediately embraced by streaming services. The top places for music discovery today happen to be on Spotify, Today’s Top Hits, Rap Caviar, Viva Latino PLUS a place on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist is hugely influential in a song become a streaming hit
  2. A song that starts at TikTok and is embraced by Streaming services like Gayle's "abcdefu" or Em Behold’s “Numb Little Bug”
  3. Top 40 Radio can no longer break a song alone unless it becomes a massive hit is put in power rotation by most of the Top 40 panel and THEN gets picked back up by Streaming services...case in point was “Levitating” by Dua Lipa, which came back in June last year to become the biggest song of the year 3 months after it was moved to recurrent by the Top 40 charts and dropped dramatically in streaming
  4. If a song is extremely lucky and is included in a super-popular streaming series like Netflix's ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Ozark,’ Disney's ‘Encanto’ or HBO's ‘Euphoria’ and gets massive exposure that can have a profound impact in stimulating audio streaming
  5. “Running Up That Hill” got that massive exposure and was central to the series for entire season on ‘Stranger Things,’ so it exploded in Streaming audio. “We Don't Talk About Bruno” by the Encanto Cast was at 30 million streams a week hit for two months until radio touched it when it was already practically burned out.

  Bottom line, there are so many places for listeners to go to listen and discover music, so it is very hard to break a current hit song. Unless there is a dominant platform that a majority of consumers go to discover music there will be less of a chance for a consensus of agreement on hits and we might not see a Rebirth phase and more hit music again for a while.

  Radio Losing Audience Streaming & TikTok Are Losing Steam Too!

  The Streaming Platforms are losing their power over the hits as well. Streaming service like Spotify and Apple are experiencing a loss of streams and TikTok is widely projected to be their successor to Streaming platforms in driving music popularity is losing its influence in driving streams. Labels are saying that TikTok is the most powerful marketing tool in music today

  We are seeing the songs at the top of Spotify's playlist Today’s Top Hits stream a lot less than in previous years and some of that is due to the popularity of TikTok. Gen Z and Gen Alpha want something that the major streaming services do not offer. They want to take a more active role in the creative process of music making their own videos and content and not just be passive. But TikTok does not always help an artist develop a relationship with the audience as its user focused and not artist focused. It does not use the artist’s videos and instead the artist’s music is being used as background music for the user's video. So, listeners are connecting almost as much to that artist on TikTok than they would if they were watching the actual artist video. Another problem is that so many new songs have a lifespan of just a few weeks.

  Also, we’re seeing a decline in the value of TikTok breaking hits as the top 10 TikTok tracks were streamed far less in 2022 than they were in 2020, fueling worries that app usage isn't "translating" as well to consumption.

  Top 10 Singles Per Year On TikTok In The U.S.

  2020 4.9 billion
  2022 1.9 billion

  That is a drop of roughly three billion streams, or 61%, in two years.

  So TikTok is not influencing the biggest hits as much as even a year ago.

  Love Of Older Music Grows Creates a New Music Challenge

  Breaking a current hit today is so very hard when 80% of what is being consumed by music consumers are catalogue titles It’s all about the sheer number of ears/eyeballs that a given song reaches through exposure in the following ways:

  One of the biggest signs of The Doldrums is a resurgence in popularity of Gold music, remakes of older songs, and older songs themselves becoming currents again. Never in the history of Entertainment has there been more consumption of older music (as well as recycled movies and tv) especially from the 70s and 80s. We saw “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac make a return to the streaming charts a TikTok user posted a video of himself skateboarding to work while drinking Ocean Spray and lip-synching to Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams”.

  Also, in the last 3 years some of the biggest music influences has come from video series like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Stranger Things’ based in the 80s bringing back hits like Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”

  But we should have seen this changing tide from new to old coming as it’s been happening over the past 2 decades. Gold titles were becoming more popular than current music in 2004 - in the U.S., catalog titles accounted for 35% of music sales that expanded in 2014 to 50% of the revenue for music. The last 3 years has seen streaming and sales catalog according to Luminate expand to 65% (2020) then 69.4% (2021) and finally 72.4% (2022). So, in 2022 we’ve seen Current music’s share fall by a full 3% to just 27.6%.

  For decades movie studios focused on creating new movies and television and labels focused on finding and developing new artists, now movie studios are looking for sure things with older movie stars being the highest paid and in most of the blockbuster movies. Also, you have older people with money being the consumers who are buying most of the music, so labels are trying to find ways to leverage their gold catalogues of older artists for repackaging as well as for song syncs with major advertising or consumer brands.

  Also, you have the effect of the major streaming platforms algorithm leaning toward the same old songs because they are more familiar (and more common to most people). But with the massive amount of music available for streaming on the major Streaming platforms by their very nature will have more older music than new and so older music gets exposed, more.

  Recently music industry executives seeing that over 70% of what listeners buy or stream are catalog titles are becoming more risk adverse toward contemporary music and new artists. They believe it’s a fait accompli, a done deal before it’s finished ... catalog titles will make up most of the revenue for labels and the it’s harder to justify that investment in new artists, as radio has seen in building the hits, it’s exponentially harder today for label’s marketing departments to develop new artists and hit songs because audiences are shared/split amongst SO many streaming platforms (Spotify, YouTube, etc.) as well as radio and of course that time is also shared with other forms of entertainment like gaming, streaming tv series and podcasting.

  Also, some music labels are even saying they don’t want to pay huge amounts of money to established stars. Which gives a bleak outlook for future new artist development and long term hitmakers. Just wait until the advent of “Web 3,” and when it becomes mainstream further eroding the hold of the creative community powerbrokers and places creators themselves in total control of their content. Then the share of ears and eyeballs will be spread out even further making it even harder to attain consensus of popularity for any one song artist (or video) and we may see even less songs become hits.

  So, what we are seeing now and possibly in the future makes it “the perfect storm” of challenges and this is worst Doldrums of all times for hit music.

  Recommendations For Radio As A Medium

  We have kicked the can down the road now for more than 20 years and didn’t deal with radio’s biggest challenges. Now we need to find a way to undo the “1000 cuts” which have our medium on such thin ice.

  1. We need to find the next great Personalities that can communicate with Gen Z and Gen Alpha
  2. We want those personalities to be Live AND Local and 24/7
  3. In a mobile phone world, and with listeners short attention spans shrinking all the time we need them to have constant and almost immediate communication with listeners thru social media (TikTok, Facebook Live) and texting. If they react with you and you don’t react with them almost immediately, they will get bored and move on
  4. We need to find a way to reduce the commercial load to 6 minutes and charging more for spots to make for the loss of revenue.
  5. Once we fix our problems, we need to promote the advantages of our medium on platforms where Gen Z and Gen Alpha and Millennials spend the most time

Luckily, we actually have an example to copy, almost all of the above is being done by station in Canada, consulted by Global Radio Consultant Ken Benson, 102-3 Now in Edmonton, Alberta which has 6 minutes of commercials an hour, great personalities in all dayparts, and constantly communicates with its listeners through texts.

Musically For Radio

1. "Play the F'ing Hits" and keep powering them! With Spotify TikTok as popular as they are and Shazam a frequently used method millions use to identify songs, you have 3 great tools to help you identify what new songs to play and even use to help build your developing categories. You also have Hitpredictor and Sales as well as further indications of the hits. But you can’t tell what songs are most popular with radio listeners without highly targeted callout for your audience to figure out what those songs are. These are the most important songs on your radio station - those songs are your building blocks, your spokes in building your music hours. There are only a handful of songs at any one time that are LOVED by your core and cume. Also people are listening less to radio so you can actually play songs even more weeks than we currently do as long as they still research well. This year with only 23 consensus hits you cannot wait months to add a hit song that is a massively streaming #1 song like Encanto’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” which radio waited 2 months too long to play when it was 30 million streams for weeks and it wound up being burned out by the time it was played and radio lost a precious hit song to power.

2. Play All the Hits (even the slow ones) When the People Meter first launched lead programmers in the Top 40 format developed a belief that downtempo songs were tuneouts in PPM. Yes, playing slow songs back to back on a format where tempo is an expectation should be followed but avoiding downtempo when a large portion of the biggest hits of all time have been ballads is foolish. Out of 12 songs an hour, you could easily play 4 maybe 5 slow songs an hour and still be a largely uptempo music hour.

3. Play all the Hits (even songs that aren’t Pop) We saw 54% of the most popular songs not being played enough to make the Year End Top 100 of Top 40 radio. Radio should be exposing AC, Rock, Country and melodic Hip Hop if they stream well.

4. Listen - Use Your Ears Check out music from every streaming platform and app out there and find your own hits: As a radio or satellite music programmer, don’t just depend on the labels or the charts!!! Whether it’s a new TikTok song you love, an unreleased album cut, a hit overseas, or a song from another format if it’s great and it sounds right on your station, and if it’s one of the best songs available, don’t be afraid to play and spin it enough and then patiently check our own data to verify that it’s a hit.

I know that programmers/Music Directors have 10 times the responsibility and a fraction of the time programmers like myself had to listen to music, but music is still, to quote Jon Coleman, ‘the base of our station image pyramid’ the main reason or one of the main reasons besides personalities that people listen to a music station …it was a #1 job in our time as programmers. When it comes to finding the next hit song and new artist that becomes core to your format, it may rest on your shoulders!

5. Give songs the time and exposure to be hits Give songs - especially the songs that show they are a hit in streaming enough exposure (6 weeks 6a-7p spins) to make sure they get a fair shake when you research them in callout.

Remember the average radio listener listens 15 to 30 minutes a day and that low level listening makes up 70 to 80% of the ratings. So, you need to give a song spins every few hours especially during the day each week often for 8 weeks to make sure they are exposed enough to all your listeners and then be patient and not kneejerk to early callout.

Also, do not give up on a song in callout until its 85% familiar for multiple weeks in a row then you can judge whether a song is going to be a hit for you

For Labels

I really worry about the effect of labels facing a changing and challenging world for music exposure and who are demoralized and hurting financially, if they don’t have song that are streaming but will test well at radio. They are considering a greatly diminished investment in new artists (and major artists). I know that may be a short-term recipe for financial success but it’s also a recipe for long term creative failure. It will have a disastrous effect for the music industry and the radio/satellite/streaming formats/channels that depend on new music and what was always a guarantee of “fresh new songs and artists.”

The solution for labels is not new in fact it’s “old school” and in many ways it’s just to maintain the discipline they’ve used for years

Just like any new product that a company creates whether it’s a new breakfast cereal, a radio station or a music artist, they require:

1. substantial investment
2. time and patience
3. product expertise (producers to help mold and develop the artist)
4. marketing to create and build an image and find ways to connect with potential fans
5. management expertise (touring merchandizing etc.).

It requires from the company, who invested in this new artist, a hell of a lot of patience ... often, many years (Warner's own Fleetwood Mac took almost a decade to break). Yes, I know that is the old model, but it still works for every other industry! However, using an artist/song streaming as the new revenue model for the music industry has changed our focus away from this strategy that has always worked. If there is going to be less focus on developing new acts, that means artists will be doing their own artist development - which is good in perhaps some aspects, but it also means that our industry loses a lot of the label’s experience and expertise in developing and marketing new artists and music.

The Doldrums: How Long Will It Last?

So far there have been seven other Doldrums beginning with the first one in 1960 and we’re in the 8th Doldrums now. The Doldrums usually lasts 3 years, sometimes less and sometimes more like the worst Doldrums up until now which was The Doldrums of 1991 through 1994. But oh yes, we’re living in the worst Doldrums in history for radio and especially Top 40 radio. If The Doldrums lasted through 2023 that would tie for the longest period for The Doldrums ever. But with what’s going on with new songs and artists depending on the huge spread for listening through streaming platforms, apps, satellite and radio it’s not hard to imagine a period where Top 40 radio struggles for longer than the longest Doldrums of the early 90s.

Brilliant Matt Bailey Integr8 Research’s projects: A generational influence on “the next wholesale mainstream new music evolution when today’s high school seniors turn 21 in 2026 -- give or take a year or two.”

I certainly hope that we see at least a Rebirth in the Music Cycle by then because that would make it 6 years. However, with share of listening splintered among multiple music platforms and we see “User Focused” creative world approaching with Web 3 technology there is now a greatly reduced chance for consensus of popularity for music and artists and so it may be even longer before we see Rebirth.