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When Jack and Jill went up the hill, they got more than just a pail of water. Or, at least, Jill did. Jack didn’t really stick around.
Jordan Fletcher, in the closing track on his Triple Tigers EP Classic (released Sept. 27), rewrites the centuries-old “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme with a surprising, modern-day twist. “About Jill” is a sensitive, almost celebrant, portrait of a single mom raising a boy who looks very much like his father, an immature rich kid who leaves a pregnant girl to fend for herself.
But Jack isn’t really the story of “About Jill.”
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“No one likes Jack,” Fletcher allows, “but you don’t want to make him the focal point.”
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Fletcher didn’t know Jack would be the topic du jour when he showed up for a co-writing session with Nora Collins (“Leroy”) at Sea Gayle in Nashville on March 16, 2022. They ended up talking about how she was rebounding from the pandemic, and in the process, Fletcher started thinking about the challenges that single women face trying to succeed in a male-dominated world. He turned to his phone for an appropriate title.
“I think I’ve got 50,000 – that’s a real number – I think, 40,000 or 50,000 voice memos on the phone of partial songs, ideas, partial ideas, full songs, completely unorganized,” he says. “And I had this thing called ‘Jack and Jill.’”
They figured out pretty quickly that they could use that title to write about a woman finding her way.
“He said, ‘You know that everybody knows Jack, but they don’t know jack about Jill,’” Collins recalls. “That got me. He started playing a little guitar part, and then I started writing that first verse.”
The nursery rhyme gave them an obvious starting point, and they altered the rhyme just enough to change the story’s direction: “Jack and Jill had time to kill.” They make out on a back road, and things develop quickly: by the end of line three, she’s pregnant, he decides he’s “too young for kids,” and he leaves it to “Jill to choose.” It’s a subtle hint that she considered an abortion (they wrote that line three months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision stripped many women of that choice). They broached the topic so gracefully that the controversy is all but eliminated.
“I think that that was important,” Collins says. “It was, you know, ‘Let’s lightly discuss a really hard topic, and let’s empower Jill.’”
The remainder of the verse and the chorus paint Jack as a playboy who eventually ends up living an easy life with a girl he meets in college. And it’s at the end of that chorus that the hook makes its debut: “Everybody knows Jack/ But they don’t know jack about Jill.”
Musically, “About Jill” disguises the serious nature of the story, using a light chord progression and breezy tempo, maintained by a strong upstroke, owing in part to Fletcher’s reggae appreciation.
Verse two contrasts Jill’s struggles with Jack’s good fortune. She works two jobs, drives a hand-me-down car and can’t look at her boy without seeing Jack’s reflection. But she still loves the kid. “She has a very, very difficult situation,” Fletcher says. “This turns out to be a lot of people’s story, and I didn’t realize that. It’s a story that wasn’t really told often.”
The bridge reiterated her ability to stay positive, concluding that life had given her lemons, but “she makes damn good lemonade.”
“You can’t predict what life’s gonna hand you,” Collins says. “It’s all a choice, how you choose to deal with things. Life by no means is easy for anyone, and if you’re a single mom or a single parent, you do the best that you can for your kid, and you got to make lemonade.”
Collins sang on the work tape at the end of the day as they considered several women – including Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley and Miranda Lambert – as potential matches. “About Jill” received good feedback, but no cuts. Meanwhile, Fletcher posted a back-porch video of the song a week after they wrote it, with the sounds of birds and traffic in the background. He finally decided to record it himself for the Classic EP.
“It honestly is sweeter coming from a guy, because it just seems more objective,” he reasons. “I could definitely see how a female would feel like it was a man-hating song, but if a guy’s singing it, it’s just a very observant song.”
Producer Austin Nivarel (Jelly Roll, Austin Snell) identified “About Jill” on first listen as a song they needed to cut, and he and Fletcher agreed that it should be presented as simply as possible. “We wanted it to just feel so real and raw,” Nivarel says.
They accomplished that by cutting it as a guitar/vocal track at the Black River studio complex on Nashville’s Music Row. Engineer Nick Autry set up two mics in the center of the studio and a couple more placed elsewhere to capture room noise. But after one or two test passes, Nivarel had the room mics shut down, deciding instead to make it authentic to Fletcher’s back-porch demos.
Fletcher played about two feet away from the mics, tracking the guitar at the same time as his vocal, which meant that his voice and the supporting instrument both appeared on every track. The performance itself had to be right, since Nivarel was unable to do much tinkering later – if he were to boost the low notes in Fletcher’s voice, for example, it would also boost the bass in the guitar notes.
“Since the vocal mic is picking up the guitar, you get what you get,” Nivarel says. “You can’t perfect performances. You can’t do too much to edit something like that. So everything the listener hears is very real.”
Fletcher also cut 3-5 minutes of environmental sound from his back porch, and the resulting atmospherics are used to present the singer even more authentically.
“About Jill” provides the clearest picture of Fletcher’s vocal sound and artistic sensitivity. But it also has increased value in the immediate aftermath of the election. Within days, misogynists began posting crude “Your body, my choice” threats on some women’s social media pages. As a result, “About Jill” rises from a well-crafted song to an important one about decency and real American values.
“I want to give light to it,” Fletcher says. “It just tells the positivity and the strength of this woman that [does what] so many women do daily. It’s the side of the coin people don’t want to look at, but it is right there.”
The Country Radio Broadcasters/Country Radio Seminar board of directors has made two significant updates to the eligibility and selection criteria for its annual New Faces of Country Music Show.
Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart has been introduced as a qualifying measure for New Faces eligibility, joining the existing Mediabase Country Chart published in Country Aircheck. The expanded chart criterion incorporates digital sales and streaming data alongside terrestrial radio airplay to offer a more comprehensive view of music performance metrics.
RJ Curtis, executive director at Country Radio Broadcasters, said in a statement: “The revised New Faces Show chart criteria more broadly reflects how our music is being exposed and consumed in 2024, and how its performance is measured. While radio airplay continues to be the critically important calculation for artist success, digital sales and streaming data are also important, accurate factors in identifying the rising New Faces and voices in country music.”
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The second update places the responsibility of determining artist eligibility and management of the submission process on record labels and artist representatives. Representatives will now confirm that artists meet the minimum criteria, submit their names for ballot inclusion, and verify artist availability and willingness to perform if selected.
This shift is also aimed at increasing the level of industry involvement and accountability, ensuring artists chosen reflect the current and future landscape of country music. The new criteria are in effect for the Nov. 1, 2024, to Oct. 27, 2025, qualification period, which will impact the New Faces of Country Music Show lineup for the Country Radio Seminar 2026.
Artists must have at least one but no more than five top 25 singles on Country Aircheck‘s Mediabase Country Chart or Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart during the qualification period. Voter eligibility requirements state that “voters must be full-time employees in programming, promotion, or distribution of country music, excluding those with vested interests in individual artists.”
The ballot will include all qualifying artists submitted by their representatives, with artists listed in alphabetical order. Ballots will be reported to and approved by the Country Radio Broadcasters executive committee before final selections are made.
The 2024 New Faces of Country Music Show, held during March’s Country Radio Seminar, featured artists Megan Moroney, George Birge, Dillon Carmichael, Corey Kent and Conner Smith. Since its inception in 1970, the show has put some of country music’s brightest new talents in the spotlight, including Tim McGraw, George Strait, Taylor Swift, Faith Hill, Keith Urban, Luke Combs, Miranda Lambert and Jelly Roll.
As iHeartMedia deals with weak advertising trends and another round of layoffs, the country’s largest broadcast radio company will save $200 million in 2025 compared with 2024 and has renegotiated 80% of its long-term debt, the company revealed on Thursday (Nov. 7) in its third-quarter earnings release.
The debt “exchange offers,” which are expected to close by the end of the year, will extend the majority of iHeartMedia’s debt maturities by three years, allow cash interest expense to “remain essentially flat,” and provide for “some overall debt reduction,” CEO Bob Pittman said during an earnings call. “The transaction support agreement marks an important step in our effort to optimize our balance sheet, and it provides the company with the flexibility to remain focused on iHeart’s transformation.”
The disclosure about cost savings and revamped debt comes days after news broke that iHeartMedia had laid off dozens — hundreds, according to one report — of staffers from radio stations around the country. Pittman called the layoffs part of iHeartMedia’s “modernization journey” that will create a flatter organization, eliminate redundancies and make it easier to do business with the company. Those cuts add to three rounds of layoffs in 2020 as the radio business struggled with an advertising slump during the first year of the pandemic.
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Throughout the earnings call, Pittman and CFO/COO Rich Bressler underscored the company’s embrace of technology to make improvements and cut costs. “Technology is the key to increasing our operating leverage and is a constant focus for us,” said Pittman. “It allows us to speed up processes, streamline legacy systems and it enables our folks to create more, better and faster.” Technology alone will reduce annual expenses by $150 million in 2025, he said, while measures taken earlier this year will bring the total annual savings to $200 million.
In explaining how iHeartMedia uses technology to save such a large sum of money, Pittman gave the example of expanding the reach of on-air talent. “What we’re able to do now, because we’ve got technology, is we can take talent we have in any location and put them on the air in another location,” he explained. “So it allows us to substantially upgrade the quality of our talent in every single market we’re in and allows us to project talent into the situations in which you’re going to have the best impact.”
As for the financial performance, iHeartMedia’s third-quarter revenue increased 5.8% to $1.01 billion, meeting the company’s prior guidance of mid-single-digit growth. Excluding political revenue, revenue was up 2.0%. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a common measure of operating profitability, was flat at $204 million and fell on the low end of the guidance range of $200 million to $220 million.
At iHeartMedia’s multi-platform group, which includes broadcast stations and radio networks, revenue fell 1.1% to $619.5 million and adjusted EBITDA dipped 20.1% to $129.9 million. Broadcast revenue dropped 1.4% due to lower spot revenue but was helped by an increase in political advertising.
The digital audio group, which includes podcasts and iHeartMedia’s digital service, saw its revenue jump 12.7% to $301 million and its adjusted EBITDA improve 6.8% to $100 million. Podcast revenue grew 11.1% to $114 million. Audio and media services revenue rose 45.3% to $90 million due to the political advertising spending for the recent national and local elections.
iHeartMedia’s Q3 2024 financial metrics:
Revenue: up 5.8% to $1.01 billion
Adjusted EBITDA: flat at $204 million
Net loss: up 360% to $41.3 million
Free cash flow: up 8.4% to $73.3 million
The world’s biggest broadcast company, iHeartMedia, has laid off another round of employees in recent days, as the debt-plagued radio industry continues to contract during the music-streaming era. “Right now, it seems like the business model they’ve had the last few years, of making one person do 40 people’s jobs, is where it’s going,” says Nick Jordan, an assistant program director of Raleigh, N.C., country station WNCB until he lost his iHeart job Monday (Nov. 4). “But we did a good job, for as long as we could, keeping everything local and community-oriented.”
A rep for iHeart, which owns 860 stations in 160 U.S. markets and advertises “there’s a local iHeartRadio station virtually everywhere,” would not specify the number of recent layoffs, which follows a wave of job cuts in March and others since the pandemic. Radio-news outlets such as Radio and Music Pros and Barrett Media have listed more than a dozen laid-off names this week, including morning-show hosts, promotion and programming execs and big-city regional directors. Jordan said he was watching a video Monday morning of Bill Squire, an iHeart colleague who lost his job in Cleveland, when “one of the big bosses” walked into his own station to deliver the news.
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“S— happens,” says Jordan, 31, a nine-year industry veteran. “It’s part of the radio business.”
Although radio listenership has declined, according to some studies, the business remains resilient, drawing 82% of adult Americans as of 2022. And while major labels such as Universal and Atlantic have correspondingly laid off radio-promotion employees over the past year, the medium is still important for breaking hits, especially in country and other genres.
According to Wendy Goldberg, an iHeart spokesperson, “very few jobs” have been affected in the 10,000-employee company. She rebuts data that suggests a decline in audience consumption.
“Our broadcast radio audience has more listeners than it did 10 years ago,” she says, citing a Nielsen study that shows that younger listeners increased slightly in the third quarter of this year. She adds that iHeart remains “the No. 1 podcast publisher, bigger than the next two combined, and we’re five times the size of the next largest digital-radio service.”
“We’ve been able to achieve this by modernizing the company and increasing our use of technology,” Goldberg says in a statement. “These changes are another step in that journey.”
Squire, a stand-up comedian who has co-hosted the Alan Cox Show on Cleveland rock station WMMR since 2013, received the news of his layoff by phone Monday a.m. “They assured me it’s not performance-based: ‘There are big cuts across the company and there’s nothing they can do,’” he recalls.
Squire, who plans to return to the road as a touring comic, promoting his album We’re Getting Famous, says the radio business is “cutting costs wherever they can.” While Jordan is hopeful the “pendulum will swing back a little bit,” Squire says of media cuts: “You see it in radio, you see it in TV, a lot of Hollywood is out of business right now. The entertainment field has changed so quickly with the Internet and YouTube and podcasts that legacy media is just trying to catch up and figure out how to adapt to it.”
SiriusXM reported a 4% decline in revenue and a nearly $3 billion net loss last quarter after it completed a financial maneuver that was aimed at simplifying its publicly traded stock, the company reported on Thursday.
The $2.96 billion quarterly net loss stemmed from a $3.36 billion non-cash impairment charge, a type of accounting expense the means an asset’s value on the company’s balance sheet was written down. When SiriusXM merged with Liberty Media’s tracking stock in September, Liberty Media valued the company’s goodwill based on a sustained lower stock price.
The charge does not impact on SiriusXM’s cash flow. However, lower subscriber revenue and softer-than-projected advertising revenue in the second half of this year caused the company to trim its 2024 revenue goal to $8.675 billion from $8.75 billion targeted earlier in the year.
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SiriusXM’s stock price was down 3.27% at $26.50 as of 11:20 a.m. in New York.
The company reported total third quarter revenue fell 4% to $2.17 billion, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and assets (EBITDA) fell 7% to $693 million, representing a 32% margin, compared to the year-ago quarter.
Tom Barry, SiriusXM’s chief financial officer, described seeing green shoots from the company’s investments in its subscription business and content, including 14,000 more net self-pay subscribers and a 6% increase in podcast advertising revenue.
“We are focused on executing our long-term strategy of strengthening our subscription business, enhancing our advertising offerings, and optimizing costs as we reinvest in the business,” Barry said in a statement.
The growth in self-pay subscribers due to lower churn reversed the contraction the company saw in the third quarter last year when it lost 96,000 subscribers. SiriusXM’s average revenue per user fell $0.53 to $15.16 due to a “higher proportion of subscribers on self-pay promotional and streaming-only plans,” the company said.
Known for its in-car satellite radio subscriptions, SiriusXM launched a new in-car subscription priced at $9.99 for just SiriusXM’s music channels. The company reported seeing podcast and on-demand listeners increasing on the app it rolled out last year.
The company invests heavily in its content. In the third quarter, SiriusXM signed an exclusive deal with “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper and launched shows with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Gen Z political commentator Dylan Douglas, and the beloved former football coaches Jimbo Fisher and Bill Belichick.
Revenue from the company’s Pandora and off-platform business segment slipped 1% to $544 million as Pandora Plus and Pandora Premium’s self-pay subscriber-based declined by 76,000 to 5.9 million. The company said the decline stemmed from fewer trial starts and churn after the price of certain plans was hiked.
The old saying that any publicity is good publicity isn’t always true in the music business. And this year, Sean “Diddy” Combs is proving that listeners and corporations alike have limits.
Near the end of 2023, Combs was enjoying the momentum of the September release of The Love Album: Off the Grid, which spent seven weeks on the Billboard 200 albums chart and peaked at No. 19 on the Sept. 30 chart week. Meanwhile, album single “Another One of Me” by Diddy, French Montana & The Weeknd featuring 21 Savage peaked at No. 87 on the Billboard Hot 100.
However, those numbers would start dropping quickly. In November, the Bad Boy Records founder was the subject of three separate lawsuits by an ex-girlfriend, Cassie, and two other people with various allegations of sexual and physical assault. While his weekly streams and radio plays — composed of various solo recordings under names including Diddy, Puff Daddy and P. Diddy — could be expected to experience some decay as the weeks passed after the album’s launch, the controversies arguably accelerated Combs’ downturn with listeners.
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When Combs stepped down as chairman of digital media company Revolt a week later, his streams fell 22%, while his radio spins fell 36%. Two weeks after that — when brands severed ties with Combs’ e-commerce company, Empower Global, and Hulu scrapped plans for a reality show involving Combs — his radio plays fell another 55%.
That’s not to say that being in the news always hurts an artist’s streaming numbers. After Combs was arrested on Sept. 16 after being indicted for allegedly running a federal sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, U.S. on-demand streams of Combs’ music jumped 37% in the week ended Oct. 3. That Combs’ music benefitted from negative publicity isn’t a surprise — heavy media coverage, whether due to a death or a high-profile lawsuit, tends to influence what listeners seek out on streaming platforms. But the post-arrest bump was short-lived. Three weeks after Combs entered the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, his streaming numbers had fallen to pre-indictment levels.
Diddy
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Radio is a different story. While many listeners continued to stream Combs’ music, radio programmers, who risk losing advertisers by playing controversial artists, quickly abandoned Combs. In the first quarter of 2023, well before any public signs of impropriety, Combs’ music was getting played on U.S. radio anywhere from 800 to 1,000 times per week. But the March 25 FBI raids on Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami coincided with a 27% drop in weekly radio spins. By the time a video of Combs assaulting Cassie in the hallway of a hotel surfaced at CNN in May, weekly spins of Combs’ songs were down to 352 — 94% below where they were when Cassie filed her lawsuit seven months earlier. By June, his weekly radio plays had dropped below 200.
Radio’s interest in Combs’ music reached a nadir soon after. The week after his arrest on Sept. 16, Combs’ weekly radio spins were down 25%, and radio programmers have largely refrained from playing his music ever since.
Combs’ experience at the hands of music streamers and radio stations echoes that of R&B singer R. Kelly a few years earlier. Long hounded by allegations of sexual abuse, Kelly managed to avoid accountability until the Washington Post ran a story titled “Star Treatment” that detailed how the music industry overlooked his deeds. In the wake of the article, Spotify and other streaming platforms decided in May 2018 to deemphasize Kelly’s tracks in algorithms and editorial playlists, and his average weekly U.S. on-demand streams dropped 10%. Radio programmers had an even bigger impact: Kelly’s weekly U.S. radio plays dropped 29% following the article’s publication.
Kelly’s arrest in February 2019 didn’t lead to an immediate drop in his streaming numbers; throughout 2019, his weekly on-demand streams consistently hovered around 15 million to 16 million. But radio programmers began abandoning him; by the time Kelly was arrested and charged by the state of Illinois in February, his weekly radio plays had already bottomed out at just over 100, down from about 2,000 a year earlier.
Over the next few years, streams of such songs as “I Believe I Can Fly” and “Ignition” would gradually and consistently decline. In 2020, Kelly’s tracks were doing roughly 9 million to 10 million streams per week. The next year, weekly streams fell to roughly 8 million, then 7 million.
Following a guilty verdict in September 2021, Kelly was given a 30-year prison sentence in June 2022. Like with Combs’ September 2024 arrest, media coverage of his sentence resulted in a small, single-digit gain in weekly streams, but the numbers showed a clear damage to his reputation. A week after the verdict, Kelly’s U.S. on-demand streams stood at 8.8 million per week — down 40% since the Washington Post article ran in 2018.
R. Kelly’s music seems to have reached a plateau, however, and interest in his catalog on streaming platforms has remained steady since his sentencing. Over two years later, Kelly’s weekly on-demand streams remain unchanged at roughly 9 million per week, though radio remains disinterested in playing his songs. This suggests that Diddy’s music could perform better online than at radio as his saga plays out.
Cox Media Group Orlando relaunched its WOEX Éxitos 96.5 station as HITS 96.5. The new Spanish AC format will be a hybrid of Spanish and English music featuring pop hits from the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s by artists like Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran, Adele and Shakira. HITS 96.5 will be hosted by Spanish-speaking radio personalities including Epi Colon, Liliani Hernandez, […]
When Warner Music Nashville released Cody Johnson‘s collaboration with Carrie Underwood, excited programmers took note, giving the ballad enough first-week spins that it debuted at No. 21 on the Country Airplay chart dated Oct. 12.
Parmalee took note, too, but the band was far less enthusiastic. Guitarist Josh McSwain texted lead singer Matt Thomas about what seemed a potential threat. Johnson’s single, “I’m Gonna Love You,” had almost exactly the same title and lyrical hook as “Gonna Love You,” a Parmalee ballad that had reached the top 10 on that same chart, just 11 slots ahead of Johnson and Underwood. Thomas was mildly stressed about it until he was able to give it a listen.
“I think I would have been a lot more concerned if we weren’t moving up in the top 10 and the song’s researching and doing well,” Thomas says. “If we’d have heard it was coming out right before ours dropped, then it’d be like, ‘Shit.’”
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There’s no legal issue at play — songwriters live by the general rule that titles can’t be copyrighted — but the programming ramifications are significant. Country broadcasters make an effort to keep the sound of their stations changing, while staying within the perceived boundaries of the format. Playing the same title back-to-back is the opposite of variety. Programmers have periodically faced the issue for years, though many outside of radio may not have contemplated it before.
One harsh scenario from 1982 illustrates the potential consequences. The music scheduling software at WKHK New York inserted a Dolly Parton & Willie Nelson duet, “Everything’s Beautiful (In Its Own Way),” next to Ray Stevens‘ “Everything Is Beautiful.” The programmer eyed the comparable titles and ran a line through Stevens’ single, costing it a spin.
“That is heartbreaking right there,” Thomas says.
That scenario is a bit different, though, than Parmalee’s situation. The Parton/Nelson single was current in ’82, while Stevens’ record was 12 years old. A gold title losing a single spin wouldn’t hurt anyone’s chart position and was unlikely to make much difference in Stevens’ royalties as a songwriter. In fact, programmers generally make an effort to keep their current singles’ spins at their assigned rotation, even if similarities in individual singles create separation hurdles.
“A great example, maybe more so than title separation, is artist separation,” WWWF Farmingdale, N.Y., PD Patrick Shea says. “When you’ve got 14 Morgan Wallen songs and 14 Post Malone songs, how do you make them work? You don’t want to lose spins, because they’re all good and they’re all researching really well, so you juggle to the very best of your ability to make sure that those songs are all getting heard.”
The issue arises more often than one might expect. Jelly Roll‘s”I Am Not Okay” is sharing space on many current playlists with Megan Moroney‘s “Am I Okay?” Meanwhile, Johnson’s “Dirt Cheap” and Justin Moore‘s “This Is My Dirt,” two songs with plots and sentiments that were even more similar than their titles, rose through the chart at the same time. KUZZ Bakersfield, Calif., had both of those titles among the seven singles that were simultaneously in heavy rotation.
“If those are the two of the seven best songs we can play,” KUZZ PD Brent Michaels says, “we’re going to do it, even though thematically — and even sonically, a little bit — they’re sort of the same.”
Labels pay attention to those kinds of details, particularly if the titles emerge from the same firm. Triple Tigers issued a Jordan Fletcher focus track, “Fall in the Summer,” to digital service providers in July, just two months after releasing Scotty McCreery‘s “Fall of Summer” to radio. Executives considered the problem, then shrugged it off.
“How many times has the song ‘Gone’ been written by how many different artists?” Fletcher asks rhetorically. “Or ‘Wasted Time?’ Or, you know, ‘Love Me Tomorrow’? How many times have those names been rewritten and connected with different people in different ways, and nobody gave it a second thought?”
Likewise, Warner Music Nashville released Tyler Braden‘s “Devil You Know” while it was already working Ashley McBryde‘s “Devil I Know” earlier this year. It wasn’t the original game plan — consumption spurred WMN to send Braden’s “Devil” to radio — but programming partners didn’t protest the move.
“If I’m being honest, that shocked me,” Team WMN vp of radio Anna Cage says. “I myself thought that there might be an issue there. But at the end of the day, they’re two completely different songs. Obviously, one’s a female vocal, one’s a male vocal, even though they have the same anecdotal ‘Devil You Know,”Devil I Know.’”
It might create some branding issues, she allows, if consumers search for the song by title online and don’t know the artist’s name. It’s not a concern with Braden and McBryde.
“It wouldn’t take long for them to realize, ‘This isn’t the one I was looking for,’ ” she says.
Programmers are prepared to manually create separation if the titles appear in the same window. Shea would want them in separate quarter-hours, though with the two “Gonna Love You” singles, their tempo already solves that problem: His rotations only allow one ballad per 15-minute sweep. Michaels has even less of an issue — both songs are among the 11 titles KUZZ has in medium rotation, and they play in order. One is slotted at No. 1 in that tier, while the other is entered at No. 6; they automatically appear about four hours apart.
“Right away, we tried to separate those,” Michaels says, “so they didn’t come up too close to one another.”
So even though those repetitive titles get noticed on Music Row and in station music meetings, they may not be the obstacle one might expect.
“I don’t think it’s a radio programming problem,” Shea says. “I think it’s a radio nerd problem because I don’t think your average listener is going to notice anything at all.”
Still, one music nerd understood the conundrum in a heartbeat. Asked about “I’m Gonna Love You” mirroring the Parmalee title, Johnson was immediately sympathetic.
“That was not intentional,” he says. “If you know those guys, tell ’em, ‘My bad.’”
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Now, that’s how to get your day off to a good start, with a phone call from Brothers Osborne, the reigning CMA Award winners for vocal duo of the year, informing you that you are a 2024 CMA Broadcast Award winner. That’s just what happened on Wednesday (Oct. 9) for six teams of broadcast personalities and four radio stations.
Any full-time, on-air broadcast personalities and radio stations in the U.S. and Canada were eligible to submit entries. The entries were judged by a panel of broadcast professionals, representing all market sizes and regions.
The categories are established by market size based on population as ranked by Nielsen. Entries for broadcast personality of the year are judged on aircheck, ratings, community involvement and biographical and impact information. Candidates for radio station of the year are judged on aircheck, ratings, community involvement and leadership and impact information.
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CMA Broadcast Awards winners are not eligible to enter the same award category in consecutive years; therefore, those who received trophies in 2023 were not eligible in 2024.
The 58th Annual CMA Awards — co-hosted by Luke Bryan, Peyton Manning and the reigning CMA entertainer of the year, Lainey Wilson — will air live from Bridgestone Arena in Nashville on Wednesday, Nov. 20, at 8 p.m. ET on ABC. Brothers Osborne is nominated for vocal duo of the year for the 10th consecutive year.
Here’s the full list of 2024 CMA Broadcast Awards nominees, with winners marked.
Weekly national
“American Country Countdown” (Kix Brooks) – Cumulus/Westwood One
“Country Gold with Terri Clark” (Terri Clark) – Westwood One
WINNER: “Crook & Chase Countdown” (Lorianne Crook and Charlie Chase) – Jim Owens Entertainment
“Highway Hot 30 with Buzz Brainard” (Buzz Brainard) – SiriusXM
“Honky Tonkin’ with Tracy Lawrence” (Tracy Lawrence and Patrick Thomas) – Silverfish Media
Daily national
WINNER: “The Bobby Bones Show” (Bobby Bones, Amy Brown, “Lunchbox” Dan Chappell, Eddie Garcia, Morgan Huelsman, “SZN Raymundo” Ray Slater, “Mike D” Rodriguez, Abby Anderson, “Kick Off Kevin” O’Connell, and Stephen “Scuba Steve” Spradlin) – iHeartMedia
“Michael J On Air” (Michael J. Stuehler) – iHeartMedia
“Nights with Elaina” (Elaina Smith) – Westwood One / Cumulus Media
“PickleJar Up All Night with Patrick Thomas” (Patrick Thomas) – PickleJar / Cumulus Media
“Steve Harmon Show” (Steve Harmon) – Westwood One / Cumulus Media
Major market
“The Andie Summers Show” (Andie Summers, Jeff Kurkjian, Donnie Black, and Shannon Boyle) – WXTU, Philadelphia, Pa.
“Chris Carr & Company” (Chris Carr, Kia Becht, and Sam Sansevere) – KEEY, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn.
WINNER: “Frito & Katy” (Tucker “Frito” Young and Katy Dempsey) – KCYY, San Antonio, Texas
“The Morning Wolfpack with Matt McAllister” (Matt McAllister, Gabe Mercer, and “Captain Ron” Koons) – KKWF, Seattle, Wash.
“The Most Fun Afternoons With Scotty Kay” (Scotty Kay) – WUSN, Chicago, Ill.
Large market
“Dale Carter Morning Show” (Dale Carter) – KFKF, Kansas City, Mo.
“Heather Froglear” (Heather Froglear) – KFRG, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.
WINNER: “Jesse & Anna” (Jesse Tack and Anna Marie) – WUBE, Cincinnati, Ohio
“Mike & Amanda” (Mike Wheless and Amanda Daughtry) – WQDR, Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
“On-Air with Anthony” (Anthony Donatelli) – KFRG, Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.
Medium market
“Brent Michaels” (Brent Michaels) – KUZZ, Bakersfield, Calif.
“Joey & Nancy” (Joey Tack, Nancy Barger, and Karly Duggan) – WIVK, Knoxville, Tenn.
“New Country Mornings with Nancy and Woody” (Nancy Wilson and Aaron “Woody” Woods) – WHKO, Dayton, Ohio
“Scott and Sarah in the Morning” (Scott Wynn and Sarah Kay) – WQMX, Akron, Ohio
WINNER: “Steve & Gina In The Morning” (Steve Lundy and Gina Melton) – KXKT, Omaha-Council Bluffs, Neb.-Iowa
Small market
“Dan Austin Show” (Dan Austin) – WQHK, Fort Wayne, Ind.
“Dave and Jenn” (Dave Roberts and Jenn Seay) – WTCR, Huntington-Ashland, W. Va.
WINNER: “The Eddie Foxx Show” (Eddie Foxx and Amanda Foxx) – WKSF, Asheville, N.C.
“Hilley & Hart” (Kevin Hilley and Erin Hart) – KATI, Columbia, Mo.
“Officer Don & DeAnn” (“Officer Don” Evans and DeAnn Stephens) – WBUL, Lexington-Fayette, Ky.
Major market
KCYY – San Antonio, Texas
KKBQ – Houston, Texas
KYGO – Denver, Colo.
WXTU – Philadelphia, Pa.
WINNER: WYCD – Detroit, Mich.
Large market
WIRK – West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla.
WMIL – Milwaukee-Racine, Wis.
WINNER: WQDR – Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
WSIX – Nashville, Tenn.
WWKA – Orlando, Fla.
Medium market
KXKT – Omaha-Council Bluffs, Neb.-Iowa
WBEE – Rochester, N.Y.
WIVK – Knoxville, Tenn.
WLFP – Memphis, Tenn.
WINNER: WUSY – Chattanooga, Tenn.
Small market
WCOW – La Crosse, Wis.
WKML – Fayetteville, N.C.
WKXC – Augusta, Ga.
WXFL – Florence-Muscle Shoals, Ala.
WINNER: WYCT – Pensacola, Fla.
When Coldplay tours, the British rockers typically play to tens of thousands of fans per show – in fact, as of Aug. 2024, their Music of the Spheres World Tour became the biggest rock tour of all time, according to Billboard Boxscore.
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So when Chris Martin & Co. hit the stage at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg – a 650-person capacity venue — on Monday (Oct. 7) afternoon for a SiriusXM Presents show in support of new album Moon Music, the crowd was freaking out more than a little bit. Which might explain why one attendee, toward the end of the concert, shouted out a request for a nonexistent Coldplay song.
The saga began when Coldplay gave fan-favorite Music of the Spheres track “Coloratura” a rare performance, explaining that people online had been clamoring to hear it live. After that, fans began shouting out song titles, with one guy yelling, “Fix It.” Presumably, the man was thinking of the Billboard Hot 100 hit “Fix You” from 2005’s X&Y, but Chris Martin wasn’t letting him off that easy.
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“’Fix It’ is another song from another band, my brother,” Martin said, shaking his head before leading the band through “Yellow.” But after wrapping up their breakthrough hit (“Yellow” was their first Hot 100 entry back in 2001), Martin seemingly decided that perhaps “Fix It” should be a Coldplay song after all. Apologizing to the fan for getting a bit “cross” with him, Martin sat down at the piano and freestyled an impromptu tune on the spot, dedicating it to the dude.
“Here is a song called ‘Fix It,’ specifically just for that guy / It’s okay if you come to a concert to call out of the name of a song,” Martin sang, chuckling good-naturedly. “[But] I’d much prefer you don’t get the name of the song wrong / Oh, fix it, let’s fix it / It was broken a long time ago / Yes, fix it, a famous song called ‘Fix It’ / That before today even I didn’t know.”
One can only imagine what it was like to be that man in that moment. In less than 10 minutes, he mangled a Coldplay song title in front of the band, got gently mocked by Martin, received an onstage apology and then had a brand-new song dedicated to him – one that will probably never be performed again. Iconic.
That unscripted moment gives a good sense of the vibe throughout Coldplay’s underplay, which was broadcast on SiriusXM later that same day. Thanks to the intimate space and a respectful but enthusiastic audience, Martin seemed warm and congenial, pointing at specific people in the crowd and sticking his tongue out for fans’ cameras. He even joked about the band going the Taylor Swift route with its back catalog. “We released Parachutes (Taylor’s Version), it’s going to do very well,” he quipped while speaking about their new LP, Moon Music.
Of the new Moon Music tracks, the live highlights were undoubtedly “The Karate Kid,” a gorgeous piano ballad that saw its first-ever live performance during the SiriusXM show, and “Good Feelings,” which brought collaborator Ayra Starr onstage and saw The Weirdos — Coldplay’s puppet alien rock band — pop up on the venue’s balcony. Much like their recent Saturday Night Live performance, Coldplay brought of Elyanna & TINI for an emphatic “We Pray,” too.
As for the anthemic sing-alongs, “Viva La Vida” and “Sky Full of Stars” enjoyed wild responses from the crowd, while a live run-through of “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face” from 2002’s classic LP A Rush of Blood to the Head proved that Coldplay can still kick ass as rock n’ roll band.
Although the mood of the show was light, joyous and celebratory (confetti blasted the audience more than once), Martin did take a moment to acknowledge that the concert took place on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and the start of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.
“Today, on October 7, we send peace to the Middle East,” Martin said prior to “Coloratura.” The juxtaposition was perhaps intentional, given the opening lyrics: “We fell in through the clouds / And everyone before us is there welcoming us now / It’s the end of death and doubt.”