Long before his politics made him polarizing, there was already a sense among some that Bruce Springsteen was not truly the people’s rock star. In my New Jersey office, there was a lot more loyalty to Jon Bon Jovi as the voice of the Garden State. Bon Jovi also had a greater footprint at radio, with three of the most enduring songs — “You Give Love a Bad Name,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and “Wanted Dead or Alive” — at Classic Hits.
There were a lot of knives already poised last weekend when Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere grossed only $16 million worldwide in its first weekend. Had it been an indie film with modest expectations, that might have been a good number for a movie about making Nebraska and not releasing Born in the U.S.A. (at least for nearly two years), but not for a film with a $55m budget to recoup. If you were already so inclined, the movie response supported the notion of Springsteen’s reduced cultural footprint.
Five years ago, Ross on Radio’s “Lost Factor” columns tried to measure those cultural footprints by looking at the strength of artists’ songs as current hits vs. their airplay at all of radio’s monitored stations. Although it often felt like a 50-year catalog and 20+-year-hitmaking streak had been reduced to just a few enduring songs, there were actually nine Springsteen hits big enough to have made Billboard’s respective year-end Top 100 Countdowns between 1981 and 1987. Of those, only two of those actually qualified as “lost” by our calculations.
“Lost Factor” measured the endurance of all Billboard year-end Top 100 songs between 1960 and 2009. The formula was the number of year-end chart points (from 100 for the largest to one for the smallest) divided by the current number of monitored spins in all formats for the week previous to measurement.
Springsteen was helped by having only one still-strong song — “Dancing in the Dark” — that finished in the top 15 (No. 14 in 1984), but six other songs in or near the bottom half of the year-end charts that still got a decent number of spins. Even “Cover Me,” a song that I rarely encounter on the radio now, got more spins than its No. 67 finish for the year would suggest. Only two songs cleared our Lost Factor dividing line of a 1.0 score at the time, the ’90s comeback hits “Streets of Philadelphia” (5.2) and “Secret Garden” (24.0).
Whatever antipathy toward Springsteen may exist now, it’s not reflected in current airplay or Lost Factor scores. In the five years since our computations, the BDS airplay we measured has been replaced in the charts by competitor Mediabase, although in previous exercises, we’ve found that both spin counts and Lost Factor calculations have remained relatively stable.
Since our initial calculations in 2020-21, total airplay for six of the nine Springsteen songs is actually up, meaning that Lost Factor is down for songs ranging from “Dancing in the Dark” to “Born in the U.S.A.” to even “Secret Garden,” although that one is a technicality, up from only one spin in the week measured to four last week, meaning its Lost Factor is now only 6.0. The songs that have declined in spins are “Hungry Heart,” “I’m on Fire,” and “Cover Me.” While some of those were down sharply — “Hungry Heart” has gone from 373 to 302 spins; “I’m on Fire” from 199 to 107 spins — none was down sharply enough to descend into “Lost” status.
To some extent, the passage of time usually does to an artist what even his detractors cannot. 1980’s “Hungry Heart” is the sort of pre-1983/pre-MTV hit that, along with many similar late-’70s titles, has disappeared in recent years. But you might have expected that about the Foreigner canon, too. “Urgent,” which appears in Deliver Me as seemingly emblematic of the type-of-1981-“radio record” that Springsteen had no intention of making, actually had 544 Mediabase spins last week.
Because Springsteen’s continued radio presence was significant, but not outsized, it’s still considerably less than, say, Bon Jovi. The former has only one song among the top 100 most-played Classic Hits, the No. 72 “Dancing in the Dark.” Bon Jovi still has No. 6 (“Prayer”), No. 16 (“You Give Love … ”) and No. 73 (“Wanted”). Springsteen’s most-played Classic Rock song is the No. 224 “Born in the U.S.A.” At Triple-A, his biggest title is “I’m on Fire” at No. 256, which represents only 34 spins against the format’s monitored reporters.
These numbers are being calculated for airplay through Tuesday, October 28, meaning that Springsteen’s airplay had a roughly even chance of being influenced by pre-release hype and post-release disappointment. But numbers weren’t sharply different for most songs than the week before. (The few significant jumps included “Glory Days,” which got about 50 more spins at Classic Hits, and “Born to Run,” about 80 more spins at Classic Rock.) It is certainly possible that Springsteen airplay could decline after the bad publicity of the opening weekend.
We’ve lived for a while in a world where the endurance of artists and their catalogs is influenced by factors other than music. It makes you appreciate this month’s achievements by Taylor Swift. Half of America is also angry at her for reasons that go beyond the music — some political, some merely player-hating — and she’s still in her third week atop both Billboard’s Hot 100 and Top 200 albums. But Swift was 15 months from her most recent hit, not 28 years. At a time when the concept of “mass appeal” is challenged, stardom is just as often about whose lack of consensus is less.
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