Adam Lambert’s newest single, “Another Lonely Night,” has not had the fastest start at radio. It is barely/kindof creeping into the top 50 of Pop Songs. Although he has reached #28 on Adult Pop, his ascent was modest and somewhat inconsistent, losing weekly audience impressions in 9 of its 38 tracking days.
But, his performance over the past three days has been more than solid, culminating in a new high in terms of daily audience impression growth on Adult Pop. With a 323,000 weekly audience impression gain today, “Another Lonely Night” was the seventh-fastest growing song on the chart.
Three days ago, it had made 2,357,000 audience impressions in the entire preceding week. Today, it has generated over 2.9 million audience impressions (in monitored Adult Pop radio stations) over the past week.
On Adult Pop, “Another Lonely Night” debuted 38 days ago, on November 13th, with 235 weekly spins and 895,000 weekly audience impressions. Since then, it has averaged a daily audience growth of 52,789 impressions. But, excluding today’s figures, “Another Lonely Night” has only averaged 45,486 in daily audience impressions growth. Excluding the past three days, and the to-date average drops down to 41,771.
Week-over-week spin increase (bullet) also reached a new high today of 164. “Another Lonely Night”‘s bullet had previously peaked at 155 on November 28th after slow acceleration from its debut at 108 on November 13th. It descended to a trough of just 39 on December 12th, but it has improved in each of the 8 daily tracking periods since, even though the song actually lost weekly audience impressions on three of those days.
Strong figures and acceleration at Adult Pop bode well for a song that is still largely untested, and that has previously shown some signs of weakness, especially at Pop. Radio programmers are still largely making uninformed decisions about whether to play the song, since a Callout report surveying listeners’ actual reactions to songs will not be publicly available until the song reaches 60% audience familiarity. Once the song reaches that threshold of audience familiarity, the audience reaction will dominate the song’s future. If the audience likes Adam’s song, then it will do well. But, we will never find out how the audience would have felt about the song unless it generates enough natural interest among radio programmers to reach the 60% threshold.
Conclusion
It is too early to tell whether “Another Lonely Night” will be a huge hit. But, the data don’t yet indicate that it won’t be.
Do I think it will be a hit? I’d like to think that it will. There are a number of good reasons to think that it might be a much larger hit than “Ghost Town.” But, weak early figures lacked the robustness that one would ordinarily expect from a future hit. Todays figures are important because they don’t lack robustness, and because they follow about one week of clear acceleration. To be clear, I will not be surprised if tomorrow’s figures are weaker than today’s. Everything flows in cycles. If Adam’s song is poised to experience a boom, however, then we would expect to see increasingly higher peaks and shallower troughs. We just saw a higher peak. So, now we watch for a shallower trough.
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