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Post by LC on May 14, 2022 20:28:39 GMT -5
I know we can listen to the countdowns in hindsight and see what's different from one year to the next, but as I was living through the early 80s, I really didn't perceive that much of a change from year to year. What prompted my question was a line I saw in rereading Billboard's review of ASIA's second album "Alpha" in August 1983:
"Any major shift in the platinum quartet's fortunes at this point will likely have more to do with changing radio fashion than with the music itself...."
Did radio really change dramatically between the spring of '82 (when ASIA's debt came out) and the summer of '83?
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Post by chrislc on May 14, 2022 21:11:35 GMT -5
I know we can listen to the countdowns in hindsight and see what's different from one year to the next, but as I was living through the early 80s, I really didn't perceive that much of a change from year to year. What prompted my question was a line I saw in rereading Billboard's review of ASIA's second album "Alpha" in August 1983: "Any major shift in the platinum quartet's fortunes at this point will likely have more to do with changing radio fashion than with the music itself...." Did radio really change dramatically between the spring of '82 (when ASIA's debt came out) and the summer of '83? I think that, if anything, radio would have been more receptive to Asia in 1983. Country was down compared to 1982. AC was down. British rock was way, way up, though not really the Asia style. But I think if programmers and listeners thought the songs were good they would have been played. |
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Post by djjoe1960 on May 15, 2022 6:56:15 GMT -5
Of course, what radio played over the years changed--check out the top songs of 1963 as compared to 1964.
Top 40 began in the mid 1950's as a mass appeal format and tried to play music that brought in listeners from teenagers through middle aged adults; that really began to change with the advent of the British invasion in the mid 1960's and ultimately led to the multi-format stations that exist today. Although the transition was slow and took many years to come to fruition.
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Post by OnWithTheCountdown on May 15, 2022 8:10:13 GMT -5
One of the biggest changes for me in terms of top 40 radio happened in a two-year period, 1979-1981. If you divvy it up into two periods (1979-1980 and 1980-1981), both of those signal a big shift in pop music.
Another one, a little more recent, would be 2001-2002, going more from boy bands and teen pop, to rap and hip-hop, and different varieties of rock.
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Post by dukelightning on May 15, 2022 8:59:14 GMT -5
One of the biggest changes for me in terms of top 40 radio happened in a two-year period, 1979-1981. If you divvy it up into two periods (1979-1980 and 1980-1981), both of those signal a big shift in pop music. Another one, a little more recent, would be 2001-2002, going more from boy bands and teen pop, to rap and hip-hop, and different varieties of rock. Well said or written Countdown. I just alluded to part of that in the other thread. There was a huge disparity which I am still trying to figure out between the Hot 100 and CT/AT40 starting in the mid 90s. It would stay that way until the change you alluded to in 2001-2 whereupon things lined up a lot better between what radio was playing and people were buying. |
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Post by chrislc on May 16, 2022 20:55:02 GMT -5
Of course, what radio played over the years changed--check out the top songs of 1963 as compared to 1964. Top 40 began in the mid 1950's as a mass appeal format and tried to play music that brought in listeners from teenagers through middle aged adults; that really began to change with the advent of the British invasion in the mid 1960's and ultimately led to the multi-format stations that exist today. Although the transition was slow and took many years to come to fruition. 63/64 has to be the #1 example of year-to-year changes in the Top 40 in our lifetimes (for most of us). Also 55/56 and I'd say 79/80, 82/83 and somewhere around 92/93 or 93/94 would be the next-best examples. Also 74/75 with the increased disco and comebacks of all those 50s and 60s artists. You'd think 81/82 would be another, with MTV's arrival, but I think it took over a year for that influence on the Top 40 to really kick in. I think there also would be an assumption that the quality of Top 40 songs would lessen due to MTV, but 83 was so much better than 82. Then began the long slow decline until 93 or 94. Or maybe that's just my age at the time talking. |
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Post by Mike on May 16, 2022 23:44:12 GMT -5
It would stay that way until the change you alluded to in 2001-2 whereupon things lined up a lot better between what radio was playing and people were buying. What actually happened there was that by 2001, labels were issuing singles less and less and less. A LOT less and less and less. Oh sure, that year we still had single releases fueling huge jumps into the Top 10 and even to #1 ("U Remind Me" and "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" both come to mind), but from 2002 to 2004, basically the only real sales activity of note happened if the singer was a product of American Idol, and consequently their single in question debuted straight at the top. But the bottom line is it wasn't a case of radio playing = people buying, simply because there was so much less and less to actually be bought. In turn, that really made the Hot 100 and the Airplay chart (at least, Billboard's overall Airplay chart) nearly mirror each other from week to week, much as was the case from 1985-87 (for, obviously, different reasons than during the mid-80s). (I say 85-87 and not 88 there, as 88 seemed to have more frequent differences at least at #1 compared to 85-87.) I will also say that it's more happenstance that radio trends - particularly at CHR - were also heavily changing during 2001. But even if they hadn't, the Hot 100 would still be heavily reflecting...whatever the overall radio picture would have been at the time. Black formats such as R&B, Hip-Hop, and Rhythmic would probably still have had an advantage due to their big-city airplay bases creating larger radio audience (which in turn meant more Hot 100 points), but if CHR hadn't also started skewing in their direction, then it's possible that those formats would not have been quite as dominant as they were. |
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Post by dukelightning on May 17, 2022 7:27:38 GMT -5
I mentioned this the other day that the Hot 100 from this week in 1998 was one of the most divergent from AT40 that I have ever run across. Half of the top 30 hits did not reach AT40. 14 of those 15 songs were by black artists. My go to station these days is an R&B throwback station not so much that it is R&B as it is a station that plays hits from the 90s, 2000s and 2010s. In my market until this station surfaced at the beginning of this year, there was no station playing many hits from those decades be it R&B, alternative or Hot AC(this station actually replaced a station that was alternative which did play Nirvana, Oasis, Gotye and a few other alternative artists from those decades but most of their playlist consisted of current hits). So getting back to this 1998 chart, there were a few more hits by black artists that did get played on AT40 like "No No No", "Gettin' Jiggy Wit it", "All My Life" and "Too Close". Well, out of those nearly 20 hits by black artists including the 14 that did not appear on AT40, only those last 2 hits get played on the R&B throwback station. And they play all kinds of 90s hits by the likes of 2pac, Notorious BIG, TLC, SWV, "Tell Me" by Groove Theory that I have alluded to and a lot more. So what that tells me is that even though R&B/hip-hop/rap was big in 1998 at least as defined by the Hot 100, it was somewhat of a misnomer. Many of those hits did not stand the test of time. Because just as a lot of #1 and big hits from the 70s and 80s on a mainstream oldies station don't see the light of day on those stations, the same happens in this genre. So radio has figured out what songs are resonant 20, 30, 40, 50 years after the fact in every genre.
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