A "WORK" RECORD: RADIO UPS THE ANTI

With the single "Work" and now the ANTI album out in the world, we leave it up to the audience to decide if RiRi has crafted another win.

The album "hit more than a million downloads in just 14 hours," according to Tidal, which powered the free ANTI giveaway along with Samsung.

Team Def Jam already secured "Work" as the #8 most-played record at Top 40 and #9 at Rhythm on Wednesday, with a total audience north of 23m—making it the most-heard song in the country on Wednesday.

But drilling down further into the Mediabase dailies from commercial radio and its gatekeepers reveals a bit of a pushback when it comes to the new single.

Both CBS and iHeartRadio played the song every hour day-of-release as part of a premiere package, and those two companies alone represented 79% of the airplay Wednesday for Top 40 Radio and 40% of Rhythm.

To see a big decline in spins the day after an hourly play bonanza is totally normal as stations adjust rotations back to a more comfortable clip, but this song is showing signs of having a precipitous drop. Many stations, most notably KIIS-FM—didn't play the song at all on Thursday. Others dayparted it.

Is this all the normal wiggle of a new song rooted in a tropical sound that needs more time to develop at Top 40? Or do some programmers need more convincing? Time will tell, as radio waits for other markers like sales, streams, and, of course, callout.

And let's not forget Badgalriri's true superpower is her unforgettable music videos, which often become their own pop-culture moments. With the compounding Drake chemistry here, we already know there could be a crazy visual coming with the potential to break the Internet.

Stay Tuned.