Radio

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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Last spring, while working with Post Malone on his upcoming country album, the hired studio songwriters took a break. Malone started noodling on guitar. “He’d be playing, like, old B-sides, Toby Keith songs, that nobody knew,” recalls Chase McGill, a Nashville veteran who has written songs for Morgan Wallen, Kenny Chesney and many others. “But he knew everything.”
When Malone’s F-1 Trillion came out in late August, the pop and hip-hop star had an advantage that previous country crossover hopefuls have lacked. He plunged into the country-music business, and into Nashville, working with respected local songwriters (like McGill, Taylor Phillips and James McNair), gigging at key local clubs (Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and the Bluebird Cafe), collaborating with veterans (he performed with Dwight Yoakam on SiriusXM) and recording duets with other stars (Hank Williams Jr., Dolly Parton, Blake Shelton, Luke Combs and Wallen are on the album).

“That’s the difference when somebody brushes up against the genre vs. someone who immersed themselves into the genre,” says Randy Chase, programming executive vp for Summit Media, the Birmingham, Ala., broadcaster that owns nine country stations. “When people try to cross into country from other genres, a lot of times it’s on their terms, and they want to put their foot into the pool. He went all in, even with the risk that it could hurt him down the road.” Adds Tom Poleman, chief programming officer for top broadcast chain iHeartMedia: “He understands country music. It’s not like he’s just trying to learn how to be a country artist overnight.”

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Post’s duet with Wallen, “I Had Some Help,” debuted at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs and the Hot 100 in late May, scoring 76.4 million streams and, earlier this week, topped Billboard’s Songs of the Summer chart. 

Adding “I Had Some Help” to heavy rotation was “a no-brainer,” says Steve Stewart, Cox Media Group’s director of country content. “Morgan continues to be one of the hottest artists on the planet, so that immediately gave us the green light.” Similarly, Summit’s country stations played “I Had Some Help” twice an hour throughout its debut day, then once an hour the next day and repeatedly through the weekend. “I heard the song about two weeks before it came out,” adds Summit’s Chase. “I said, ‘This is a country record that is also going to go pop.’” 

Last week, F-1 Trillion landed atop the Billboard 200, Post’s first No. 1 since his pop album Hollywood’s Bleeding in 2019. (The new album also hit No. 1 on Top Country Albums in its debut week.) “There are legitimately 15-plus songs that could be radio singles,” says Scott Donato, program director and operations manager for WGTY, a country station in York, Penn. “It reminds me of late-’90s, early-2000s country. He’s been able to capture every corner of the format.”

Before Post Malone became famous as a hip-hop artist with 2015’s “White Iverson,” he performed at a Dallas-area Italian restaurant where he worked during high school, and later covered songs by Hank Williams and Bob Dylan in videos he posted online. He became an established star who could fill U.S. arenas, then began transitioning to country around 2018.

The marketing teams at Big Loud Records and major label Mercury/Republic Records, already working together on Wallen’s releases, soon began brainstorming Post Malone marketing plans from the conference room at Big Loud headquarters in Nashville. (The two labels are teaming up on radio promotion – Big Loud for country, Mercury for Top 40 and other formats.) “Post ingratiated himself within the creative community — opened up to writers, collaborators and session musicians — that were the throughline of this campaign,” says Patch Culbertson, executive vp and general manager of Big Loud, adding that his company helped make introductions to Parton, Shelton, Williams and others. “They had a great vision from the beginning.”

Big Loud execs persuaded Mercury’s team to start the album’s campaign earlier than planned, so it could set up a splashy CMA Fest appearance, in which Post and Shelton performed “Pour Me a Drink.” “He got the hit on TV, which is a whole different demo from what he was used to serving,” says Candice Watkins, Big Loud’s senior vp of marketing. “He got to meet the industry.”

In April, Post performed at the Stagecoach Festival, where Jordan Pettit, the Grand Ole Opry’s director of artist relations and programming, was in attendance. Pettis later spoke to Alex Coslov, executive vp of Mercury Records, and “there was immediate interest on their behalf to pursue his Opry debut as part of their launch plan,” Pettit recalls.

Post performed at the Opry for the first time in mid-August. “It began to take on the feel that this was not just a pop artist leaning into country music for a moment in time,” Pettit says. Coslov added to Billboard: “Our core strategy was built around showcasing the authenticity of Post’s entry into country music by highlighting his time in Nashville.”

Several country programmers say Post is the type of artist who will be able to toggle between genres, depending on his musical impulses, and may not be absent from Top 40 and hip-hop radio playlists for long after F-1 Trillion. (His first three albums combined for 11 billion to 12 billion on-demand streams apiece, according to Luminate, but he dipped on 2022’s Twelve Carat Toothache, with just 1.88 billion streams.) “This is a guy who went, ‘This is my art, here it is,’” says Tim Roberts, vp of programming and format captain for radio chain Audacy. “Could he make a whole pop album next year? Absolutely.” Post’s tour begins this Sunday in Salt Lake City, and “it really is all country-based,” according to Big Loud’s Watkins, although she expects pop hits, too.

So far, Post’s pop-to-country transition has far surpassed  similar moves by Sheryl Crow, Jessica Simpson, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, or even Beyoncé, whose Cowboy Carter album was a culture-dominating hit earlier this year, but did not stick to country radio formats. “The Beyoncé songs weren’t great country songs; they were great Beyoncé songs,” says Nate Deaton, general manager of online country station KRTY.com in San Jose. “The Sheryl Crow country record was really good, but it didn’t have any hits on it — it didn’t have ‘Pour Me a Drink.’ It didn’t have one of those songs that was a standout runaway smash.’”

Deaton calls Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker’s debut country album, 2008’s Learn to Live, a more apt comparison: “He did the exact same thing that Post Malone did. He went to Nashville and ingratiated himself with Nashville songwriters. Darius got on a bus and went to all these radio stations, even though he was a big star.” For Post Malone, Deaton adds, “It would not surprise me at all to see an ongoing country career, a la Darius.”