The first time Don McLean saluted his ‘50s rock and roll heroes, it produced a timeless classic. Despite its length, “American Pie” has only faded from the radio relatively recently. And after more than 48 years, it still got nearly 300 spins last week according to Nielsen BDSRadio.
Nine years later, in the middle of a CHR downturn, and after eight years without an American hit, McLean scored a surprise No. 1 in the U.K. and top 5 in the U.S. with a remake of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” That song became the No. 40 hit of 1981. Last week, it got no monitored airplay in North America.
That makes “Crying” the hit song of the 1980s with the highest “lost factor,” according to the calculations that the Ross On Radio column has been publishing since early April that measure the distance between a song’s popularity at the time and the amount of airplay it typically receives now. After calculating which hits of 1982, 1984, and 1989 are most lost, we’re looking this week at top 100 of the ‘80s overall.
To the ROR readers who’ve found our “Lost Factor” articles a helpful diversion in recent months, “Crying” fits a pattern now familiar from previous years: soft pop from the early ‘80s doldrums that doesn’t quite qualify even for the new Soft ACs that have popped up in recent years, much less the Classic Hits, Adult Hits, and Classic Rock stations that give any vintage title most of its current airplay. It also fits a pattern seen in songs ignored by today’s Soft AC—being an early ‘60s remake, it comes across as even older than it is.
The early ‘80s are responsible for a disproportionate number of the decade’s lost songs, but the No. 2 song is from 1989, a time when CHR was again in transition. But it’s from Sheena Easton, whose debut “Morning Train (9 To 5)” was a hit in the U.K. and U.S. at the same time as “Crying.” Easton dramatically reinvented herself throughout the decade, working with both Prince and Babyface. But the latter-penned “The Lover In Me” is the second most-lost song of the decade.
Each Billboard year-end chart of the ‘80s was calculated individually, then together to come up with the 100 most-lost songs, as well as a separate top 65 for the second half of the decade. More about the calculations and their backstory can be found here.
Full list of lost songs of the 1980s here
radioinsight.com
