Where Have the Hits Gone?
By Peter Don, BPR
Something significant is showing up in music research, and radio programmers should be paying attention.
2026 Music Research across several markets points to the same uncomfortable truth: the songs listeners genuinely love are overwhelmingly from a different era. In one market, just three of the top 50 songs ranked by favourite were released after 2020. The rest belonged to the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, with a handful from the early 2010s. The catalogue, not the current chart, is where the emotional connection lives.
The next market tells a broadly similar story, though with some nuance worth noting. Across the general audience sample, seven post-2020 songs made the top 50, a modest improvement but still a clear signal that recent music is struggling to compete with established favourites.
The one group showing more openness to newer music is women aged 25 to 34. Around ten post-2020 titles made the top 50. This group is the most ‘current-friendly’ of any segment tested. Despite this, the majority of their highest-scoring songs predate 2021.
What makes this finding particularly striking is that it holds across markets with meaningfully different music cultures. This is not a single-market quirk or a symptom of an overly nostalgic playlist on one station. This trend appears to reflect something broader: a genuine deficit in emotional depth among newer music, at least as measured by listener passion rather than familiarity.
There are real programming implications here. For pop-leaning AC and Hot AC formats, rotating songs too aggressively to make room for current releases risks leaving listeners emotionally underserved. Gold and recurrent records are not filler. For many listeners, they are the point.
The question radio needs to sit with is not how to make room for the new, but how to earn the same depth of feeling with what is being released today. Until the data shifts, the classics are doing some very heavy lifting.
There was a moment, more than 15 years ago now, when Top 40 music was so hot that songs from Usher and Rihanna were showing up at the top of AC tests almost instantly. Around that time, AC started taking its cues on new music from Top 40 and not helping foster new songs, so there were no more Daniel Powters or James Blunts where they shared ownership. Then Top 40 music got harsher and there was less for AC to pick up. So if the gold-based AC is a bigger station in most markets than Top 40, and Top 40 hasn’t provided that much usable music anyway, there’s not going to be much recent music that comes through.