MAYBE, JUST MAYBE: THE BIG RED ONE (AND FIVE, 10, 14 AND 20)

By now you’ve probably seen the graphic on the Instagram story of every exec at Ron Perry's Columbia, spelling out the radio headline of the week: Peter Gray’s red-hot Big Red team has dominated this week’s Mediabase Classic chart by scoring the #1 #5, #10, #14 and #20 spots. For those of you still counting on your fingers, that’s five records in the Top 20, all of which are moving up this week. Which is good, right?

With Harry Styles’ endlessly infectious “Watermelon Sugar” grabbing #1 in only its 11th week on the chart—and the pop icon’s prior #1, “Adore You,” not just holding on but growing at #5 in its 35th frame—it would seem a long and successful path lies ahead for Harry, Peter and top 40 lieutenants Matt Stevens and Brady Bedard.

Meanwhile, Columbia's Powfu leads recent signings at #10, with the supercharged Jawsh 685 x Jason Derulo at #14 and Diplo & Morgan Wallen at #20. And with buzz building for the new BTS single, Columbia promotion’s momentum looks locked in for the coming months.

If memory serves, we haven’t seen one label own five songs with northward movement in the Top 20 of this all-important chart since the days when Joel Klaiman set up Monte Lipman’s Republic assembly line, latterly polished to perfection by Gary Spangler, who has made “Spangmania” an unstoppable force.

Harry with Big Red's Samantha Brenner, Jim Burruss, Peter Gray,
Brady Bedard and Matt Stevens. Harry even looks pretty in a mask.

Besides Republic’s domination and Columbia’s enormous current run, we’ve seen continuing hot streaks in the past year from Brenda Romano and Chris Lopes at Interscope, who will guide DaBaby into the Top 10 this coming week—foreshadowing the charge of Lil Mosey, Trevor Daniel x Selena Gomez and Maroon 5 in the coming weeks.

With Columbia now locked in at the top of the Pop until sometime in September, we will next turn the spotlight on subformat leaders as they endeavor to make lemonade from the lemons dealt us by this pandemic.

As always, this installment of Maybe, Just Maybe is brought to you by the clean, refreshing taste of Mediabase Classic. With fewer calories, less tar and nicotine and a user-friendly interface, Mediabase Classic refreshes the parts other chart platforms can’t reach.