A&O&B's Annual Top 10 for the Year: The Top Songs and Artists of 2015

If you need a break from your Christmas shopping list, try this list: A&O&B’s annual Top 10 Songs and Artists of the Year.

Each December we compile our research-driven list from our online and call-out data and data rankings for every song we played and tested for at least six weeks during the previous 12 months.

This year there were a total of 92 titles on our list.

Here’s our Top 10 for 2015:

Rank	Artist	Title
1	Little Big Town	Girl Crush
2	Bryan, Luke	Strip It Down
3	Hunt, Sam	House Party
4	Owen, Jake	What We Ain’t Got
5	Shelton, Blake w/ Ashley Monroe	Lonely Tonight
6	Bryan, Luke	Kick The Dust Up
7	Hunt, Sam	Take Your Time
8	Church, Eric	Talladega
9	Bryan, Luke	Games
10	Church, Eric	Like A Wrecking Ball

  

Top 10 Honorary Mention: Chris Jansen who’s “Buy Me a Boat” missed the Top 10 by the smallest of margins.

“Girl Crush” was the only song this year to score a perfect 1.0 (the best Like A Lot score a song can achieve having ranked #1 in research for 6 or more weeks).  Last year there were two (“Drink A Beer” and “Play It Again”). There were four in 2013.

Contributing to the decreasing number of “perfect” score songs recently is the continuing lack of "top song consensus" week to week across markets. This underscores the importance of testing your current music on a regular basis.

Another trend we’ve been tracking is the increase in ballads among the top scorers. 

Since 2002, there have been more tempo songs than ballads in both the Top 1/3 and overall.  That trend barely held this year as tempo songs outnumbered ballads in the Top 1/3 by just a 52% to 48% margin.

Additionally, for each of the past three years, ballads have had an increasingly larger Top 10 footprint.  In 2012 there were three ballads in the Top 10. There were four in 2013, five in 2014 and now seven in 2015.

For those tracking so-called “Bro Country,” 2015’s BC titles indexed slightly lower than last year’s.

We also use our song-performance data to identify the Top Artists of the Year.

For the second year in a row and third time in the past four years, Luke Bryan was the artist point winner.  This was the fourth consecutive year that Luke placed multiple songs in the Top 10: three this year, four last year, two in 2013 and three in 2012.

2015’s runner up was Eric Church who placed two songs in our Top 10. 

The rest of the top 5 included Chris Young, Sam Hunt (who also placed two songs on our Top 10) and Carrie Underwood. 

Blake Shelton, who was our Top Artist in 2013 and who was second to Luke in 2014 finished 7^th this year.

Here's where to check out A&O&B's Top 10 lists for the past three years: 2014, 2013 and 2012.

If you simply can't get enough Top 10 lists, Nielsen has more - from TV to music to snacks, you can see their continually updated Top 10 lists  here. 

A&O&B clients have access to free, local, online music testing using our custom software. If you have questions or an interest, reach us at Mike@AandOandB.com or Becky@AandOandB.com.

Country Music 2012 Year in Review Part One: Is Luke Bryan Worthy of All Those Awards and Kudos?

Oh yeah. No doubt. 

Fueled by Tailgates and Tanlines, 2012 was Luke Bryan’s year.

This month alone, Luke racked up 9 awards including Male Artist of the year and Artist of the Year on the fan-voted American Country Awards December 10th on Fox (plus, earlier this year, an American Music Award). 

He also was singled out as Overall Artist and Male MVP in this week’s Country Aircheck.  Again, deservedly so.

He’d have won the Albright & O’Malley & Brenner’s “Best Testing Artist of the Year” award as well if we offered it (note to Fox producers).

Each year A&O&B produces a list of the top testing songs of the year based on call-out and online listener research. And this year, Luke led the list.

Luke Bryan scored 3 titles in our Top 10 for 2012. This is the fourth time this has happened in the past 10 years: Blake Shelton in 2011, Zac Brown Band in 2010, and Toby Keith in 2003.

Good company.

Besides Luke, Jason Aldean and Eric Church were the only artists to have three songs in the A&O&B’s top 30. Blake placed two in the top 20 as did Lee Brice. Dierks Bentley was the only other artist to place two songs inside the A&O&B top 30.

That Bryan, Aldean, Shelton, and Church all had big years mirrors data the February data we reported in A&O&B’s 2012 Roadmap online perceptual study where the “New Songs from Millennial Stars” cluster (where these artists reside) was the #1 25-54 music cluster among the 12 we tested.  

In all, 90% of songs in our top 1/3 were from Millennial Artists and there were no artists in the Top 10 whose discography (major label) precedes 2000.

Meanwhile, Historical Superstars (defined here as current or previous ‘Essence/Core Artists’ who had multiple chart hits prior to 1997) placed no songs in the top 10 (second year in a row) and just two in the top 1/3 – one each from Kenny Chesney and Toby Keith.

“New Songs from Historical Superstars” as a music cluster still was one of the top four 25-54 clusters in terms of appeal in Roadmap 2012, and Kenny Chesney (4 songs), Toby Keith (3), and Tim McGraw (2) did place multiple songs on the year-end list while George Strait and Alan Jackson had one each. However the overall presence of Historical Superstars in the top 1/3 has been trending down since 2008.

While we had more artist diversity in terms of the number of different artists overall, the top third had less. In fact, this is the second “least diverse” top 1/3 since we began tracking this in 1998.

Artists that were new to this year’s chart had a smaller footprint as well. Kip Moore had the highest chart position for a first-time-on-the-charts-in-2012-artist; Hunter Hayes made it to the top 20.

So back to Luke and his three in the A&O&B Top 10 joining a select group of artists. Listeners responding so positively and passionately to "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye," "I Don't Want This Night to End" and "Drunk on You" puts a punctuation mark on what has been a great year. 

Next in Part Two: How This Year’s Music Compared to Previous Years