Sean Ross

Who can listeners trust to curate new music for them?

Earworms can require a day or two to take hold with me. It might be a song I heard a few days earlier. It might even be a song I merely thought about — maybe I scheduled it while editing a radio-station log. But the earworm waking up this morning was pretty much unavoidable. It was the theme song from WKRP in Cincinnati.

By June 26, 2009, the day after he died, listeners had decided they liked Michael Jackson’s music again.

Olivia Rodrigo wants to have the Song of Summer 2026. She launched her new project with an uptempo single, rather than the epic ballads that had led her last two albums. She released “Drop Dead” just over a month ago, timed so that any initial buzz would carry the song through Memorial Day, although even mid-April can be a dicey proposition for any song if the initial streams disappoint.

When Radioinsight and Ross on Radio reported last month that a half-dozen iHeart Media stations, including WAXQ (Q104.3) New York, were downplaying the word “Classic Rock” in varying ways, it was one of the most-read ROR columns in recent months. It was also one of the most commented-on — both in the column itself and on Radioinsight’s Facebook page, where readers responded both to this article and to their reportage.

The first “why isn’t CHR playing ‘Choosin’ Texas’” article was written by Liveline host Mason Kelter last January, when that song was about three months old, but already phenomenal. Programmer Phil Becker weighed in six weeks ago, asking how the Top 40 PDs who had rejected that song as “not their sound” could so enthusiastically get behind Freya Skye’s “Silent Treatment,” which went top 10 as a song that CHR could own, but with a fraction of the streams.

Mason Kelter is on vacation this week. These are guest observations from Ross on Radio author/editor Sean Ross. Two years

Over the years, the concept of “live” has been just as enthusiastically attacked as “local,” and often for the same reason. It costs money. The necessity of doing radio in real time became an easy target of ridicule early on. “So let me get this straight. You’re saying I need to pay somebody to sit in the studio and read the newspaper for four hours so they can open the mic a few times an hour to say, ‘More music, better variety?’”

The layoffs are brutal. The station sales for too little money to owners who take stations out of the format mainstream are dismaying. The owners who just shut the station off and walk away from the license are particularly devastating. And, even for those not directly affected, there is additional misery in watching the disheartening moments for radio pile up on top of each other.

To look at the Classic Hits and AC charts now, you’d never know what a force R&B, dance, and early Hip-Hop had been in pop music from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s. From the moment KPWR (Power 106) Los Angeles signed on in 1986 with R&B and an increasing quotient of dance music, Top 40 sounded sterile by comparison. Within a few years, most CHR stations in any market with a significant Hispanic population was leaning “rhythmic.”