- 12/22/2014
- Posted by: Mike O'Malley
- Category: country radio programming
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This time of the year we’re tripping over “End of the Year” lists.
Still, we’re pleased to add one more – A&O&B’s annual “Top Songs of the Year.” Each year we publish for clients the final research-driven rankings of every song we added over the previous 12 months. There were 88 in all in 2014.
Here are this year’s Top 10 songs:
|
Rank
|
Artist
|
Title
|
|
1
|
Luke Bryan
|
Drink A Beer
|
|
2
|
Luke Bryan
|
Play It Again
|
|
3
|
Brantley Gilbert
|
Bottoms Up
|
|
4
|
Blake Shelton
|
My Eyes
|
|
5
|
Frankie Ballard
|
Sunshine and Whiskey
|
|
6
|
Blake Shelton
|
Doin’ What She Likes
|
|
7
|
Florida-Georgia Line
|
Dirt
|
|
8
|
Dierks Bentley
|
Drunk On A Plane
|
|
9
|
Justin Moore
|
Lettin’ the Night Roll
|
|
10
|
Luke Bryan
|
Rollercoaster
|
This is the third consecutive year that Luke Bryan has placed multiple songs in the Top 10 and third time in four years that Blake Shelton has done it. To put that in perspective, the only other artists to have multiple songs in our Top 10 were Brad Paisley who had two in 2011 and the Zac Brown Band who had 3 in 2010.
“Drink A Beer” had the top “Like A Lot” score – a perfect 1.0 (the song’s rank average over the last 8 weeks of its life as a current) and spent 13 weeks as our number one testing song. In addition to his Top 10 finishing titles, Luke also appeared on the 12th song of the year as part of Florida-Georgia Line’s “This is How We Roll.”
This made Luke Bryan our Top Artist of the Year.
Blake Shelton, who was last year’s Top Aritst, finished number two to Luke. Blake had two songs in the Top 10 this year as well as one more in the 20s.
This is the second year in a row that Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton had the most titles in the top 1/3 of all songs tested.
Meanwhile, Jason Aldean, Dierks Bentley, Florida-Georgia Line, Lady Antebellum and Cole Swindell had good years too with each placing two titles in the Top 30.
Notably absent from among the top test titles were Historical Superstars – major artists that had multiple yearly hits prior to 1997.
Total Positive scores were similar to what we saw last year. However “Favorite/Like A Lot” scores for all songs were softer again this year. Anecdotally, market-to-market, we’re seeing an increasing lack of consensus on the biggest hits each week making local research ever more important.
Here’s an Infographic with more. Enjoy!
