Ross On Radio's "Lost Hits" Series

[JMW]

Instead of starting a new thread every time I post one of these articles, I thought I would have a thread that contains all the links in one place for easier access. Any new links I've posted will be marked with "NEW!"

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Lost Hits Articles By Year

1967 - "Lost Factor" 1967: Everything but the (Brown Eyed) Girl

1971 - Lost Factor 1971: Some Songs Are Like a Broken Yo-Yo

1974 - 1974 Is the Land of the Lost Factor

1977 - Gonna Fade Now: Lost Hits of 1977

1978 - Surprisingly, Many Hits Of 1978 Are Staying Alive

1979 - Made for Dancin', But Not Built to Last: The Lost Songs of 1979

1982 - How Lost Are Pop Music's Lost Hits? (the article that started it all)

1984 - In a Beloved CHR Year, What Songs Got Left Behind?

1989 - For Some 1989 Hits, It's Easy to "Look Away"

1995 - The Lost Factor 1995: "Come and Get Your Lost"

Lost Hits Articles Focusing On Decades

1960s - From The '60s, The Most "Lost" Songs of All

1970s - The Top 100 Lost Songs Of The 1970s

1970s - The "Lost Factor" Top 100, 1975-79

1980s - Lost Hits Of The '80s, Year By Year

1980s - The 100 Most Lost Songs Of The 1980s

1980s - How I Found "Lost" In The (One-Time) Hits Of The '80s

1990s - The Early '90s (1990 to 1994): Real Airplay Reduces The "Lost Factor"

1990s - Lost Hits of the Early '90s, Year by Year

1990s - Rating the Lost ‘90s

Misc.

Why Hit Songs Become "Lost"

Lucky Stiffs … And Other Enduring Songs That Missed the Year-End Top 100

The Lost Factor Comes To Country

NEW! Lost Factor: Bob Dylan vs. Paul Simon

[JMW]

Two new articles focusing on the '90s.

The Early ‘90s: Real Airplay Reduces The “Lost Factor”

At the beginning of the 1992 chart year, Billboard introduced monitored airplay to the Hot 100, effectively eliminating the paper add, along with the SoundScan sales information that got rid of the record-store equivalent. And as our series moves into the 1990s, calculating the songs of the 1990-94 era with the highest “Lost Factor,” you can definitely see the effect it had by the last two years of that era.

In 1990, there were seven songs that made Billboard’s Top 100 of the year but receive no airplay now. In 1991 and 1992, there were seven. In 1993, there were five. In 1994, there were only three.

The “Lost Factor” calculation is the number of points a song received for its placement on the year’s top 100 — 100 points for No. 1 and so on — divided by the number of spins it received in the seven-day period prior to our calculations. A song with a “Lost Factor” of more than 1.0 is receiving disproportionately little airplay to its hit status at the time. In 1990, there were 51 songs above a 1.0. In 1991, there were 54. In 1992, there were 52. In 1993 and 1994, those numbers were 44 and 40 respectively.

We chose to focus on 1990-94 here because even with the methodology change, the years are relatively of a piece in terms of what was happening with Mainstream Radio, declining as it was upstaged by Country, Alternative, Hip-Hop/R&B and “Rhythmic Top 40” radio. It was also the last period in which the year-end charts were relatively unaffected by hit songs that were never released as commercial singles, and thus not represented on the Hot 100, although 1994 had one such hit in “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows. From then on, through 1998, the year when Billboard finally stopped requiring a commercial single, mega-smashes that weren’t in the year-end top 100 became a frequent occurrence, from “When I Come Around” by Green Day to “Killing Me Softly” by the Fugees.

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Lost Hits of the Early '90s, Year by Year

But for individual titles in each year’s top 15, a lot of the pattern of “what’s lost” will look familiar if you’ve been following our Lost Factor articles so far. Many of the top 15 tick one or several of the following boxes for “Why Songs Become Lost”:

• Teen pop acts;
• Hits that were the softest of the CHR’s soft end — songs not retrieved by even the current wave of new Soft AC stations;
• Second, third, and fourth singles by superstar acts — particularly at a time after Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” when every label, artist and manager felt the need to go deep;
• First (or subsequent) singles from disappointing superstar follow-ups. George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90” is actually a song with a low “lost factor,” but not his other ‘90s hits.
• Songs on the cusp of pop and R&B — whether it’s pop acts gone “new jack swing” or R&B with guitars like Janet Jackson’s “If.”
  

There’s one significant difference. 1994’s top 15 contains two songs by R. Kelly: “Your Body’s Calling” and “Bump n’ Grind.” Both of those songs were still readily found on the radio two years ago, before listeners and broadcasters finally decided they were no longer comfortable hearing Kelly. They’re the first instance thus far of artists themselves being a significant contributor to their Lost Factor.

[JMW]

New article: Gonna Fade Now: Lost Hits of 1977

Usually, a hit movie is a good thing for a hit song’s endurance. Some of the most unavoidable ’80s titles–“Footloose”; “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”; “Eye of the Tiger”–are all-ages records, even for listeners who didn’t grow up with them, because of the still popular hit movies they come from.

But “Rocky” apparently doesn’t have the same influence now that “Rocky III” did on the longevity of Survivor’s hit. In our look at the “Lost Factor” and the hits of 1977, Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)” has the eighth steepest trajectory between airplay then and airplay now. (Only Philly airplay keeps it from being higher.)

[JMW]

1974 Is the Land of the Lost Factor

In a year that stretched from “Eres Tu” to “Radar Love,” the rockin’ pop records of mid-‘70s screaming Top 40 aren’t the songs with 1974’s highest “Lost Factor”—our calculation of which songs traveled the furthest between saturation airplay then and negligible airplay today. Even “Seasons in the Sun” only finishes at No. 36 in our calculations. “The Night Chicago Died,” another one of the year’s top provocations, is No. 48. The Blue Swede version of “Hooked on a Feeling” is actually the No. 21 most-played song of the year’s Billboard Top 100 hits.

The two songs that do have the highest “Lost Factor” of the year are songs that would undoubtedly be controversial lyrically today, in part because they were controversial in 1974. “(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka is No. 1 with a Lost Factor of 73, higher than any “Lost Factor” number from the 1980s, although still short of the perfect 100 score for 1960’s “Theme From A Summer Place.” We haven’t announced rankings for the entire ‘70s yet, but when we do, Anka’s hit will be the newest song in a top 10 otherwise dominated by 1970-72 titles. Mac Davis’s “One Hell of a Woman,” a song that drew similar accusations of chauvinism, is second with a 46 score.

[dannyd]

This week on Crap from the Past:
Ron Gerber is playing Disco songs from Sean Ross’ “The Lost Factor 100:1975-1979”.

[JMW]

This latest article doesn't have as much of a focus on lost hits as the others, but the "lost factor" is mentioned so I'll include it here.

Lucky Stiffs … And Other Enduring Songs That Missed the Year-End Top 100

When we’ve looked at the “Lost Factor” that removes big hit records from radio gold libraries and the public’s consciousness over the years, we’ve always used the Billboard Top 100 for a given chart year in our calculations. There are always a handful of songs, most of them Classic Rock, that are now played disproportionately to their year-end standing at the time. But what about those songs that didn’t even make the year-end Top 100 to begin with?

One of the common hallmarks of songs with high “Lost Factor” scores is that they weren’t quite as big as radio people remember them — they were songs that peaked around No. 9 or lower and never got to power rotation. They never got a true chance to be remembered as hits by most listeners. Yet, a lot of the songs here also peaked between No. 9 and No. 15. It might seem contradictory to say that they endure because listeners never got sick of them in the first place, but a song such as “In Your Eyes” got library play and a concerted effort on its behalf over the years that never went to, say, “Driver’s Seat.”

[JMW]

The newest "lost hits" article focuses on a year that will be 50 years ago soon: Lost Factor 1971: Some Songs Are Like a Broken Yo-Yo

Like 1982, the very first year we calculated in our “Lost Factor” series, 1971 was a year of transition at pop radio. Two years earlier, facing the growth of FM album rock radio, top 40 radio went softer and more bubblegummy than ever. Now AOR radio was unavoidable and stations such as John Garabedian’s WMEX Boston were more aggressively looking for the songs that would restore rock cred to the format.

But 1971 was also the early ‘70s epicenter of teen idols, who were cycling quickly around this time from Bobby Sherman to David Cassidy and the Partridge Family to Donny Osmond and his brothers (with the more credible Jackson 5 against all comers). Teen acts had been with us from the beginning, of course, but not since the early ‘60s had they seemed so particularly stigmatized, something that was probably a product of the rift between pop and progressive rock.

[mkarns]

Sept 22, 2020 17:44:56 GMT -5 JMW said:

The newest "lost hits" article focuses on a year that will be 50 years ago soon: Lost Factor 1971: Some Songs Are Like a Broken Yo-Yo

Like 1982, the very first year we calculated in our “Lost Factor” series, 1971 was a year of transition at pop radio. Two years earlier, facing the growth of FM album rock radio, top 40 radio went softer and more bubblegummy than ever. Now AOR radio was unavoidable and stations such as John Garabedian’s WMEX Boston were more aggressively looking for the songs that would restore rock cred to the format.

But 1971 was also the early ‘70s epicenter of teen idols, who were cycling quickly around this time from Bobby Sherman to David Cassidy and the Partridge Family to Donny Osmond and his brothers (with the more credible Jackson 5 against all comers). Teen acts had been with us from the beginning, of course, but not since the early ‘60s had they seemed so particularly stigmatized, something that was probably a product of the rift between pop and progressive rock.

I'm more than a few months younger than Sean Ross, and I like "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep".

Also, I'm not sure exactly what dates were monitored for this article, but September 12-13 had a Premiere AT40 from September 1971, which included "Chirpy", "Go Away Little Girl", and the optional extra "Yo-Yo"--as well as the still much-played "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Maggie May", two of the five that Ross says "punch above their weight" now.

[JMW]

I've been away from this for a while...

The latest of these was posted yesterday:

The Lost Factor 1995: “Come and Get Your Lost”

In 1995, there were six songs that made the year’s top 100 but had no airplay now, vs. three such songs in 1994. The highest lost factor for the year was a 49 vs. a 53 from the year before. I had wondered if the launch of all-‘90s WMIA (Totally 93.9) Miami, two weeks after we published our 1990-94 calculations, would lower the Lost Factor of ‘90s hits, but that station plays about 225 songs, including some local hits that never made the year-end countdown. The growth of an all-‘90s format, should it take root, is more likely to help songs that were already relatively enduring.

I'll be playing catch-up in the next few days, so be on the lookout for more links. (ETA: There's only three of them, so I'll post them tomorrow.)

[JMW]

As promised, here's the other three links to the Lost Hits series that haven't been posted yet:

Lost Factor 1967: “Everything But The (Brown Eyed) Girl

The Top 100 Lost Songs Of The 1970s

The “Lost Factor” Top 100, 1975-79

[JMW]

Two new ones:

1) Rating some songs heard on an all-90s station: Rating the Lost ‘90s

2) Focusing on country hits (from 1993) for the first time: The Lost Factor Comes To Country

A guest appearance on one of 2019’s most phenomenal songs. A daughter who became a successful multi-format hitmaker. A renewed interest in the hits of the ‘90s, including some that had been off the radio for a while. None of these were enough to put Billy Ray Cyrus and “Achy Breaky Heart,” the No. 1 Country song of 1992, back on the radio. When I wrote about Cyrus two years ago during his renewed success with Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” “Achy” was getting 37 spins a week, according to BDSRadio. Last week, it got fewer than 30.

So it should be no surprise that when we brought our “Lost Factor” calculations to Country hits for the first time that it’s two of Cyrus’s follow-up singles atop the list.

[JMW]

Lost Factor: Bob Dylan vs. Paul Simon

Years ago, I had a conversation with a co-worker who believed that Paul Simon, not Bob Dylan, would be the artist for the ages. Dylan was the critics’ favorite, but Simon was the people’s poet. Until last week, I hadn’t felt the need to mediate this one. I had reason to believe they would both retrieved from my music collection from time to time.

By now, the more public, large-scale version of this discussion, prompted by the sale of Simon’s catalog, is very much last week’s Twitter dust-up. But after a year of “Lost Factor” articles looking at how songs endure, I was interested in what airplay had to tell us about how the two catalogs, most famous for their 45-to-55-year-old compositions, were holding up at radio so far.

There's also two other articles I haven't posted yet, but I'll get to those tomorrow.