TEMPO TANTRUM

The challenge before Top 40 radio at present is playing records they’ve never played. Three of the Most Added songs at Pop last week—Billie Eilish’s “When the Party’s Over,” Julia Michaels’ “What a Time” f/Niall Horan and H.E.R.’s Grammy-rocking “Hard Place”—buck the usual Top 40 mandate of tempo, tempo, tempo.

The Eilish song is particularly deliberate, with spots of actual silence; the Michaels-Horan track is delicate; and the H.E.R. song is meditative. These are all, for Pop, genre-defying records. Is this the beginning of a shift toward playing artists that are making an impact at streaming and other platforms, or is it merely an anomaly?

The trend, if it is one, has materialized in the wake of arguably the biggest song of the last year, the A Star Is Born monster “Shallow,” stopping and failing in the 20s at the format. Is the worm turning at last?