Country Currents Look Strong in the 1st Half of 2020

Need some good news? Country currents look strong in the 1st half of 2020!

Each July we pause to take the temperature of our currents halfway through the year. This year, there’s some pretty good news – just when we could all use some. Country’s Passion Scores at the halfway point in the year are strong – in fact, they’re the best they’ve been in 8 years.

This and some other interesting take-aways coming up – but first, here’s how we determined song eligibility and broke out the data.

Methodology

Our mid-year rankings are based on the final or most recent Like A Lot Average and Total Positive Score for each of the songs we played or are still playing in 2020. Each title must have had at least six consecutive weeks of research to qualify for inclusion.

The Like A Lot Average is a song’s Like A Lot rank averaged over its final six weeks as a current (or the song’s current six-week average rank if the song is still active).

Because Like A Lot Averages are rank-based, lower is better. Thus a song with an average rank of 2.0 is stronger than a song with an average rank of 2.5.

Conversely, Total Positives scores are percentage-based. That is, we add the percent of Like A Lot and the percentage of Like scores, so a higher number is better. Thus a song with an 80% Total Positive score is stronger than a song with a 75% Total Positive.

Country Currents Look Strong in the 1st Half of 2020 Because of Like A Lot Scores

So far through the first half of the year, Country’s Average Like A Lot Scores have improved significantly. In fact, this is the best half-year performance in 8 years (remember that lower numbers are better when looking at the average rank position as we do with LAL).

And it’s not just a few red-hot songs that are responsible for the improvement. The number of songs averaging a final Like A Lot score of less than 2.0 was identical to last year at four.

	J-18	J-19	J-20
LAL Average <2.0	2	4	4

No Tears for the Tiers

Like A Lot scores were better in all three tiers: Top Testers, Mid-Testers, and Bottom Testers. Here’s how each Tier has trended since 2015 (once again, with Like A Lot, lower is better):

Total Positive Trends – Not as Positive

Unfortunately, Total Positive Scores continued to drift lower (remember higher is better).

And, just as we saw in the Like A Lot graph, all three Tiers performed in tandem.

As far as the lowest Tier of currents, this is the softest score since 2015.

This is also the closest that the Top Testing Tier has been to the Bottom Testing Tier.

2020 First-Half Artists

In all, there were 42 different artists exposed in the first half of the year.

Five artists made their first appearance on our charts (Ingrid Andress, Gabby Barrett, Travis Denning, Jameson Rogers, and Gwen Stefani).

Five artists had two testers in the first 6 months of the year. Sam Hunt, Luke Bryan, Florida-Georgia Line had solo performances while Eric Church, Luke Combs, and Jon Pardi appeared in solos as well as collaborations. 

Appeal by Gender

We compared our songs by gender. Songs were classified as “female” if the lead or featured vocalist, or half or more of a duet was female.

In all, eleven female artists (26%) were included in this datapoint.

The Total Positive scores were nearly identical across gender.

Recommendations

It’s great news that the new music played on today’s Country mainstream stations looks strong through the 1st half of 2020. Whether this translates into ratings in the first half of the years remains to be seen. There are variables at work that we haven’t seen before.

However, our music tracking is encouraging none-the-less. Based on what we’ve seen, here are four recommendations which you can put in place today:

1 – Continue to use Like A Lot Scores (or whatever your Passion measurement is) to drive your categories and spins. Total Positive Scores continue to drift closer to each other diluting the differentiation across Tiers. Meanwhile, Like A Lot Scores continue to show significant separation across the Tiers. Thus, if you’re using Total Positive Scores rather than Like A Lot Scores for your music decisions, you risk giving more spins songs with lower “Passion/Must Hear” values. “Love is more powerful than Like.”

2 – No amount of weeks played will make a stiff a hit. Among all songs that completed their current cycle as of the end of June, songs in the bottom Like A Lot Tier were charted roughly 80% as long as the Top Like A Lot Tier. However, the Like A Lot scores for the Top Tier were nearly 6 times better than those in the Bottom Tier.

Of course, we’re talking here about weeks of airplay and not total spins.

However, unless you simultaneously boost spins, giving a song “just one more week” in at the same spin level is simply delaying the inevitable drop.

3 – Song averages for male and female artists were nearly identical. As we’ve seen for some years now, the hit potential across genres remains relatively even.

4 – As in 2019, Mainstream and Pop are the dominant Genres in the first half of 2020. The best testers were relatively balanced across genres. You want your playlist to be the same.

Love to hear what additional takeaways you find in the data!

Related:

A&O&B’s 2019 Year End Music Rewind: 2019 Ends With Cautious Optimism

© 2020, Mike O’Malley, O’Malley Media Group, LLC

Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash