If
we were talking about wrestling, Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan would have been
the Tag Team of the Year.
While
that’s one of the few awards Country doesn’t have yet, Blake and Luke do win
our award for best A&O&B chart performers of 2013.
The Songs
Driven
by our weekly research, here is how A&O&B’s Top 10 for 2013 shaped up.
The Artists
2013
was another great year for Blake Shelton. He not only placed three songs in our top
30, all were in the top 10 including the number one song “Boys 'Round Here.”
This is the second time that Blake has had three songs reach our top 10 (he did it in
2011 as well) and the fifth time overall that this has been done by a single artist in the past 10 years: Blake as we noted in 2013 and 2011, Luke Bryan in
2012, Zac Brown Band in 2010 and Toby Keith in 2003.
Meanwhile
Luke Bryan had three songs in the top 30 including two in the top ten plus song 24 for the year - the Jason Aldean-Luke Bryan-Eric Church title, "The Only Way I Know."
Jason
Aldean, Lee Brice, Eric Church, Florida-Georgia Line, Tim McGraw and The Band
Perry each placed two songs in the top 30.
90%
of the Top 1/3 titles in 2013 were by Millennial Artists. Those of you who
follow our Roadmap studies know that in February this year we detailed the
appeal of various country music clusters with “New Songs from Millennial Artists” being
the number one music cluster for multiple demos including 25-54.
While
90% is a big number, new artists didn’t necessarily benefit. In fact, 2013 was a mixed bag for them. Four
first-time charters had songs that scored well enough to average a rank of 10.0
or lower (lower is better) during their time as current. However, only one new
artist cracked the top 1/3: Tyler Farr. This is just the second time that only
one new artist has broken into the top 1/3 on our list since we began
tracking this statistic in 2001.
Meanwhile
there continues to be minimal chart presence for Historical Superstars. Tim
McGraw (2 songs including the “Highway” duet with Taylor Swift) and George
Strait (1) were the only Historical Superstars (which we define as core artists
with multiple chart hits prior to 1997) to have songs in the top 1/3. For
perspective, there were 11 in 2008.
The Stats
In
addition to artists and titles, A&O&B tracks a number metrics. As we
usually do let’s look at two: Total Positive and Like A Lot.
Total
Positive scores were off for the second year in a row following 2011’s peak. Songs ranking in the bottom 2/3 declined at a slightly greater rate than songs in the top 1/3. We’re looking at higher overall scores than we had for most of the first
decade of 2000 but lower scores since 2011.
The
Like A Lot metric was mixed. 2013's average Like A Lot score for our top 1/3 was flat from last year however the average for songs in the bottom 2/3
fell for a second straight time. That drop was big enough to make the gap
between the Like A Lot ‘have and have-nots’ the widest it’s been in four years.
Stations
whose primary source of music information is tracking spins are vulnerable to a
competitor who is tracking their listeners’ tastes.
As
we wrote last year, a great programming resolution for the New Year would be to
regularly take your listeners pulse on the music you play.
A&O&B offers client stations online music testing, free, as part of our full service commitment. We’ll be glad to answer your questions about how it works.
A&O&B offers client stations online music testing, free, as part of our full service commitment. We’ll be glad to answer your questions about how it works.
1 comment:
Hey Mike Not realty sure how I stumbled across this but good read.
IF you would like to hear some local country music check out a song I did. Cheers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPINQAtydDs
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