By Karen Glauber

How are we going to get through these last few days before Nov. 3 without imploding? Oh yeah, and Mercury is deeply in retrograde, which is why my phone dies at least twice during every call and the shift key on this laptop stopped working this morning. It’s the musical distractions that power me through: Julian (my 12-year-old) and I danced in the kitchen during last week’s Glass Animals virtual concert—did you happen to notice when singer Dave Bayley dropped a ballot into a mailbox prior to “Tangerine?”

Tomorrow, I’m going to bend the rules on screen time for both of us so that we can watch Billie Eilish’s Where Do We Go: The Livestream. Thankfully, there are opportunities to feel connected to our passion for live music through these virtual experiences

I hope you will join me in giving Marisa DiFrisco from Caroline a virtual standing ovation for being #1 and #2 Most Added this week with Shaed’s fantastic new single “No Other Way” and Clairo’s monster smash “Sophia.” “The student has become the master,” read my text to Marisa on Tuesday, resisting the urge to call her Grasshopper.

The most essential format-exclusive records right now are by female artists: Cannons’ “Fire for You” is #8 in Shazam in Los Angeles, single sales kicked in huge and cumulative streams are responding to airplay. Seriously, this record is yours and yours alone, so treat it with the reverence it deserves.

New York magazine proclaimed in a headline: “beabadoobee Is a Rock Star.” One by one, programmers are falling in love with her. “Care,” is now Top 20, and I expect callout to kick in soon. Of course, there’s no callout right now because there’s nothing else that sounds like it on the radio. The Mscores, however, are fantastic in airplay markets, which would seem to indicate that the Alternative audience is happy to hear “Care” on the radio. I can think of (at least) a dozen core format artists that radio didn’t want to play at the beginning.

My job, as I’ve chosen to define it, is to introduce new artists into the mainstream, with every ounce of passion and data in my arsenal. To be honest, some weeks are completely discouraging because the task seems insurmountable. Why wouldn’t radio embrace a new Alternative artist who has 825k Instagram followers with 30% engagement? Seems obvious, right?

Romy’s “Lifetime” is the Entercom “Pick of the Week” commencing 10/26. It’s profound exposure for a truly incredible song—I expect that programmers will love how it sounds on the air… Meg Myers’ newest single, “Any Way You Wanna Love,” is a one-listen add for her myriad programmer fans, especially on the heels of her #1 hit, “Running Up That Hill.” We all love Meg. You will all play this song.

Many of the songs that programmers are gravitating toward are TikTok hits and are fully launched in the marketplace before radio jumps on board. Two thoughts come to mind: Now that TikTok is being used to market classic artists—like Stevie Nicks’ recent appearance on the platform, which followed Mick Fleetwood’s “response” clip to the viral video that reignited Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”—is TikTok over? I know that its appeal is key among the 12-and-under crowd, but will the Boomers forsake Facebook for TikTok? Where will radio find its hits? How about a scenario where radio (all formats) develops its own hits from the ground up again? How much fun would that be!

The #1 best-selling song on the iTunes Alternative chart is “Bang!” by AJR, which is also #7 on the U.S. Shazam chart. An Alternative rock band broke this year—why wouldn’t you play the new format-exclusive single “Bummerland?”

Cheryl Broz at Curb has a wonderful record she’s working by a band called Saint Nomad. Give a listen to “Nothing to Lose.”

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