BARBIE BOLSTERS TOP 40

Listening to Z-100

It had been years since I listened to top 40 radio, which is odd, since it is the format I grew up with, and for decades was a good way to keep up with the hits. We all knew that "top 40" was an exaggeration, that you would be more likely to hear the same 10 or 15 records on a station at any given time.

Now, even that seems generous and quaint. I've spent much or the last week listening to one of the country's leading Top 40 stations, New York's Z-100/100.3 FM, official call letters WHTZ, one of the flagship stations of the dominant iHeart Radio chain. Whenever I step in the car, I am almost certain to hear four or five of these songs:

• Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Aqua: "Barbie World"

• Billie Eilish: "What Was I Made For?"

• Dua Lipa: "Dance the Night"

• Taylor Swift: "Cruel Summer," or "Anti-Hero"

• Olivia Rodrigo: "get him back" or "Vampire"

• Miley Cyrus: "Flowers" or "Used to be Young"

• Selena Gomez: "Single Soon"

• Doja Cat: "Paint the Town Red" (samples Dionne Warwick's "Walk on By")

The first three are all from Barbie: The Album which came out July 21, 2023. Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" came out on her 2019 Lover album, but seems destined to be a seasonal hit for the rest of this Swift Century. Cyrus' "Flowers" was released January 12, 2023, so that means a four year old song and a nine-month old song remain in "consensus power rotation," in the jargon of top 40, at this station.

This is not a stunt playlist: Top 40 music is almost all by women, although you might hear Eminem featuring Rihanna on "The Monster," or "Seven" by Jung Kook, formerly of the huge K-Pop boy band BTS. If you're "lucky," you might hear current top 40 (sometimes known as CHR, contemporary hit radio) hit, "We Didn't Start the Fire," the Billy Joel song covered by Fall Out Boy.

These songs, like disco, are rhythm without blues.

Sean Ross, a longtime journalist and radio consultant who writes the Ross on Radio newsletter, reignited my interest in top 40 with a column he did a few weeks ago. Citing Guy Zapoleon, another veteran consultant who keeps track of the number of "power rotation" tracks top 40 radio will play in any given year, 2020 was considered a slow year with 30 power tracks. This year, 2023, there will be 17 or 18. And Doja Cat's "Paint the Town Red," as of about 10 days ago, is only track less than 10 weeks old.

The language of radio is intriguing. To break up the overwhelmingly female star so years ago, I heard Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" this week on Z-100, a hit from 2006. Nothing wrong with mixing in oldies, of course, which Ross, in a recent Zoom interviw, said are now called "throwbacks." A song more than, say, seven months old, is a "recurrent," although Cyrus's "Flowers" is still being played as "current" on many top 40 stations.

As the top 40 playlists have shrunk, so have their influence. A top 40 station was once aimed at a mass audience. It began with the rise of rock and roll and ran well into well into the 1980s, with Michael Jackson and Prince and Madonna and Whitney Houston keeping the format alive, even though almost all of the stations had switched to FM.

There was one blip in the late 1970s: Disco, which replaced conventional top 40, and perhaps the format still hasn't recovered. "I Heart own the majority of large market top 40s," Ross said. "In most places, they like to have a top 40 as part of their offerings. Some don't do as well [as highly-rated Z-100, which was No. 3 in the New York market in the recent Nielsen ratings] but it won't be like 1992, when a lot of stations just walked away from top 40, and for awhile, New York didn't have a top 40 station." iHeart Radio uses the long commercial breaks to promote its other products: Tickets to the sold out annual so-called "Jingle Ball," or promotions for its true crime podcasts.

When I was starting out in the early 1970s, I got to attend the weekly staff meetings at CBS Records. The most important, or at least most interesting to me, was the weekly radio promotion get-together. With Clive Davis sitting at the head of the table, the dozen or so people responsible for getting their records played on the radio faced their most important corporate confab of the week.

The goal was to push a single to number one on the pop charts, which depended on getting the record played on top 40 radio. There was a fascinating formula for building a hit. A song might be getting played on smaller stations in what were considered "tertiary" markets: smaller cities such as Grand Rapids, MI; Boise, Idaho; Omaha, NE. They had less to lose by taking chances on new music, or regional artists that might be doing well on the local club or concert circuit.

If one of these artists were on a CBS Records label, it was the radio promoter's job to bring these potential hits to a larger audience. Secondary markets at the time might have been Indianapolis; Albany, NY; Columbus, Ohio, and Kansas City, Mo. Once these were in the bag, it made it easier to get to what I call the major-minus primary markets, the big city stations such as KLIF in Dallas and CKLW in Windsor, Ont. Such was the power of CKLW's music director, the late Rosalie Trombley, whose own excellent pop tastes had more influence than data, that Bob Seger dedicated a song to her, "Rosalie." 

Get on those stations, and you could have a top 10 national chart record. But to get to number one, you needed two stations: KHJ in Los Angeles, and WABC in New York. My memory is that WLS in Chicago was important, but not as much as KHJ and WABC, possibly because of the super-competitive fluctuations in the volatile Chicago market. Get on KHJ and WABC, and the promo guys could pop the champagne corks, look for a little extra bonus in their paychecks.

Now, the era of the aggressive promotion by record labels of songs to radio is just about extinct, replaced by streaming. "Increasingly, labels won't bring a song to radio without a 'streaming story', and radio doesn't want them to," Sean Ross said. "Radio doesn't want the responsibility [of choosing hits]. One of the reasons you don't recognize anything beyond the top 17 [in a year] is that the pipeline from labels to radio has broken down. Labels don't want to spend the money, and it's not necessary."

For years, music nerds would wait for the weekend to hear Casey Kasem countdown "America's Top Forty." That role now belongs to the ubiquitous Ryan Seacrest, who took over both Kasem's franchise and what is now titled "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest." He is one of the top two billed stars of Z-100. The other is morning show host Elvis Duran, whose show originates in New York and is syndicated to anywhere from 40 to 80 different stations [the internet is confused on this], with the press of a few buttons. After 10 AM Eastern Time, Seacrest is Z-100s nominal host, though he is broadcasting from a studio in Los Angeles, or somewhere like it. "I couldn't tell you if he's in Los Angeles," Ross said dryly, "but he's not sitting on West 55th Street or wherever in a studio."

Depending on the hour, you might hear five songs in an hour during Seacrest's "shift" with commercial blocks that are at least, I swear, 15 minutes long. You'll hear Seacrest boosting Boost mobile during these periods, as well as accident lawyers and promos for other iHeart Radio products, such as free tickets to the annual sold-out “Jingle Ball” December 8 at Madison Square Garden, or true crime podcasts.

But at least it beats the main draw of otherwise easygoing Elvis Duran morning show, which features the ages-old radio trope of prank phone calls, or as they call it, "Phone Taps," as in, "you've been phone tapped."

The problem is you're almost always going to be pranking people on their cell phones, and people just are not as patient as they once were. And the perpetrator is Duran's sidekick Danielle, whose job is to irritate people with hostile fake observations, anonymous complaints, and others designed to get the person on the receiving end angry and cursing. The more bleeps the "funnier" I guess.

People get their blood pressure up; maybe they'll have a heart attack on the air, ha ha! They keep hanging up, and they have to be idiots to keep answering their phone from the same number.

These go on way too long until Danielle or Duran interrupts to say, this is the Elvis Duran show, and you've been "phone tapped." These are raging, angry, divisive times with top 40 no longer the center of a monoculture; you rarely hear the person on the receiving end laugh in recognition. For one thing, it was not funny, and for another, many people might wonder who this Elvis Duran guy is anyway. Most people might think the same thing about the whole top 40 format. I mean, this Doja Cat: Is that the same person as Dora Katz, with whom went to day camp?

I should mention any song by Olivia Rodrigo is worth waiting for.