Half of the Most-Played Songs On Contemporary Radio Are 6+ Months Old; See Worsening Trend

Stuck on Repeat: How Radio’s Fear of the New Is Freezing the Charts

(April 7, 2025).  If it feels like radio hasn’t changed its playlist since you pulled out your winter coat, you’re not imagining things. The same songs that blanketed the airwaves during Halloween — heck even last Spring — are still riding high now that it’s almost time to fire up this year’s grill.  In fact, half of the 20 most-played songs on contemporary hits radio have been charting for over six months — some for more than a year.  Radio is stuck on repeat, and the data backs it up.

Here’s the breakdown listed by current chart position, song title/artist, and number of weeks on the Billboard Radio Songs chart, which tracks the most-played tunes on terrestrial radio in the U.S. and is one of three inputs — along with Streaming Songs and Digital Sales — to the magazine’s marquee Hot 100 list. 

The songs by Teddy Swims and Benson Boone have already surpassed the one-year mark while four others — by Shaboozey, Sabrina Carpenter, Hozier, and Post Malone ft. Morgan Wallen — could all see their first anniversaries on Radio Songs before Memorial Day arrives (just seven weeks from now).

It’s the clearest sign yet that contemporary hits radio is sticking with the familiar — unwilling to take risks and move on from proven hits that were introduced several seasons ago.

And it’s a trend that appears to be worsening.  A comparison of the same charts from five and ten years ago shows that radio has increasingly held on to big hits for much longer than it did in the past.  Even within the streaming era, with all things being equal, radio is less willing to take chances on newer releases than it was just five and ten years ago. 

Here’s a comparison of the Radio Songs top 20 from last week, five and ten years ago.

So why does radio seem to be stuck in neutral?  It’s not as if these artists haven’t released newer tunes that could easily replace their older ones on stations’ playlists.

The Big Three of 2024 Have Never Left

Take the artists behind last year’s three biggest Hot 100 songs — Swims’ “Lose Control,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song,” and Boone’s “Beautiful Things.”  Those tunes have been hanging around the top ten for all of 2025, so far, and are on track to be ranked among this year’s biggest hits at the wrap-up in December.  “A Bar Song” is on pace to rank within the year-end chart’s top five and would become only the second song to do that in consecutive years and the first since The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” finished 2020 and 2021 as those years’ No. 1 and No. 3 biggest songs, respectively.

But Swims, Shaboozey, and Boone have all released follow-up singles — several in fact — that have failed to even approach the ubiquity of their monster 2024 hits.  As a lead artist, Swims has released more than a half-dozen singles since “Lose Control” first charted in late 2023, and four of those — “The Door,” “Dirty” (feat. Jessie Murph), “Bad Dreams,” and “Are You Even Real” (feat. Giveon) — have made the Hot 100, although only one has placed in the top 40 (“The Door,” No. 24 peak).  “Bad Dreams” climbed to No. 42 on the latest chart.

The numbers for Shaboozey’s and Boone’s follow-up efforts are no better than Swims’.  Shaboozey followed “A Bar Song” with two official singles — “Highway” and “Good News” — with only the latter making the Hot 100 (No. 47 peak).  Boone, meanwhile, has released three singles since “Beautiful Things” peaked at No. 2 in March 2024: “Slow It Down,” “Pretty Slowly,” and “Sorry I’m Here for Someone Else.”   None of them have climbed higher than No. 32 on the Hot 100.

Those three artists are not alone.  Seven of last year’s ten biggest hits — the above three plus Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Post Malone & Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help,” and Hozier’s “Too Sweet” — were still in the top 20 on the latest Hot 100 (dated April 5), essentially six months into Billboard’s 2025 chart fiscal year, which began in mid-October. Unlike the others, however, Lamar, Wallen, and Carpenter have each been able to follow-up their biggest hits with other high-charting singles.

So, clearly the artists and their labels have pushed newer singles to radio, but radio won’t budge from their tried and true chart toppers.  I can just imagine what a current Top 40 program director’s justification might be: “We’re giving the audience what it wants. And right now, that’s still ‘Espresso.’”

The “Blinding Lights” Effect

After the unprecedented success of The Weeknd’s 2019-2021 hit, “Blinding Lights,” which charted in three successive calendar years and, for a short time, was the longest charting single in Hot 100 history (90 weeks), radio and the music industry have increasingly embraced the notion that songs are more like investment assets than merely hits.  With little marketing needed, the industry has realized that the return on investment it can get from one smash hit is just as good as the decades-old strategy of labels marketing three or more singles in spaced cycles to jack up album sales.  

Today’s hit albums are buoyed by streaming.  If that streaming happens to come mostly from the album’s featured single — for months and months on end — then so be it.  Besides, this phenomenon acknowledges that people really are comfortable listening to the same hit songs for months on end (and probably always have been, even if the Billboard charts’ older methodologies didn’t always reflect it).

Billboard Chart Differences and The Streaming Effect

This blog has devoted lots of ink to how Billboard’s chart calculations have changed over time, with the advent of streaming making it the most dominant factor in determining the weekly Hot 100 rankings.  But, as mentioned above, even within the past twelve years — all falling within the streaming era — radio has become more conservative with its playlists.  So streaming and chart methodologies alone don’t explain the most recent trend. 

Yet, this slowdown of chart turnover rates makes sense when one considers that radio has always followed consumption patterns — whether it be from the purchase of physical products in previous decades to the streaming of individual tracks today.  If the same hits are being streamed tens of millions of times each week, then what incentive does radio have to move on from those tunes to ones that haven’t yet lifted off?

Whatever the dynamic, this blogger longs for the days when one big hit by an artist was followed immediately by another — with multiple songs having a shot at achieving ubiquity rather than one dominating for months — and years — on end.  Some of you may recall an era long ago when songs barely lasted in the top 20 for three months, much less three quarters.  Check out this weeks-on-chart data from the Top 20 of the Hot 100 chart dated April 6, 1985.

Of course, a great song deserves its shine. But when the industry treats smash singles like long-term stock options instead of creative milestones, it squeezes out the possibility of surprise — and robs newer songs of their shot at the spotlight.  Here’s hoping radio soon rediscovers its sense of adventure.  Until then, we’ll all keep humming the same familiar hooks… whether we want to or not.

DJRob

DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff!  You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.

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