Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks
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The Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks chart (formerly known as Adult Contemporary Singles and only Adult Contemporary) lists the most popular songs weekly calculated by airplay and occasionally sales in the United States. Billboard magazine publishes this listing which includes adult contemporary and pop songs played on "lite-pop" and adult contemporary radio stations and available for sale in stores across the United States.
Like most other Billboard charts since 1998, airplay-only songs are allowed to enter the Adult Contemporary chart besides commercially available singles. The first song to reach the AC chart without being available as a retail single was Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely" in 1977.
[edit] Comparison with the Hot 100
As noted in the above history of the chart, although some people would assume that The Billboard Hot 100 and the Adult Contemporary (AC) chart are the same thing, they are not. The AC chart lists only pop/contemporary songs, while the Hot 100 includes songs from every genre.
This situation has created some notable chart listing comparisons between the AC chart and the Hot 100 over the years. Pop songs generally tend to chart higher on the AC chart than the Hot 100 chart since on the Hot 100 they are competing with songs from other genres, such as country or hip-hop. One example of this was pop singer Amy Grant's 1991 single "That's What Love Is For" from her Heart In Motion album. The single topped the AC chart but reached the #7 position on the Hot 100. In fact, every one of Grant's singles have done better on the AC chart than the pop chart, and some have even charted solely on the AC chart.
There are exceptions to this, however. In 1988 the Beach Boys topped the Hot 100 with their pop single "Kokomo." "Kokomo" did not make it to the top spot on the AC chart, however, and it peaked at #5, even though "Kokomo" was a pop/contemporary song.
Other notable singles by adult-appeal artists which reached #1 Pop but missed the top of the AC chart (despite making the AC top five) included "Wind Beneath My Wings" by Bette Midler, "Top Of The World" by The Carpenters, "You Needed Me" by Anne Murray, "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" by Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, and "Don't Wanna Lose You" by Gloria Estefan.
In other instances, an artist with an established AC track record may release an uptempo song that becomes a big pop hit but is not widely accepted at AC radio. One example is that of Madonna. Of her 11 #1 Hot 100 hits from 1984-2000, only two ("Live To Tell" and "Take A Bow") reached #1 AC as well. Three others ("Crazy For You," "Like A Prayer", and "This Used To Be My Playground") reached the AC top 10 without going to #1, four others charted AC but missed the top 10, and two ("Justify My Love" and "Music") did not chart AC at all. On the other hand, two other Madonna singles - "La Isla Bonita" and "Cherish" - have reached #1 AC while falling short of #1 Pop. Olivia Newton-John was an AC staple for much of the 1970s, charting nine #1 AC hits from 1974 to 1980, but her biggest pop hit, "Physical", stopped at #29 AC while topping the Hot 100 for ten weeks, and some of her other early 1980s pop hits, such as "Heart Attack" and "Twist Of Fate", failed to chart AC.
[edit] Chart history and composition
Billboard has published an adult-music chart since July 1961; it was originally called "Easy Listening" and was simply a listing of the top Hot 100 hits of the week excluding songs considered to be rock and roll. The #1 song on the first Easy Listening chart was "The Boll Weevil Song" by Brook Benton; the first female artist to top the chart was Connie Francis with her version of the standard "Together". In the early years of the Easy Listening chart, the top song on the chart was generally always a Top 10 pop hit as well. The methodology for compiling the chart at that time allowed some rock and roll artists, such as Lesley Gore and The Drifters, to make the AC chart on occasion with their softer or ballad releases, regardless of whether Easy Listening and MOR radio stations were actually playing those songs. Over the next several years, the chart went by a variety of names, including "Middle-Road Singles" and "Pop-Standard Singles".
In 1965, Billboard revamped the Easy Listening chart to better reflect what MOR stations were actually playing, and the composition of the chart changed dramatically. As rock music continued to harden, there was much less crossover between the Hot 100 and Easy Listening chart than there had been in the early half of the 1960s. Several #1 Easy Listening hits of the late 1960s made the pop chart in only minor positions, "Bubbled Under" the Hot 100, or (as was the case with John Gary's 1967 hit "Cold") failed even to "Bubble Under". In 1967, only one single reached #1 on both the Easy Listening and Hot 100 charts - "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra.
By the same token, it would likely surprise many modern-day radio listeners to learn that many of the 1960s titles played on AC radio stations nowadays, such as "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" and "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers, "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, "Respect" by Aretha Franklin, "Downtown" by Petula Clark, and "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & The Papas, never made the AC chart when they were first released because they were considered too "hard" for the MOR format of the day (or, in the case of "Unchained Melody," did not chart AC until they were re-released years later). Even the Beatles and Supremes had to wait until 1969 for their AC chart debuts (with "Something" and "Someday We'll Be Together," respectively). Songs that were popular on Easy Listening radio during the 1960s have, for the most part, been relegated to the Adult Standards radio format.
This situation began to change toward the end of the 1960s and into the early and mid-1970s. By then, the audiences that MOR stations were trying to attract were more likely to identify with rock and roll than with the music of their parents' generation. They gravitated toward so-called "chicken rock" stations, which played a mix of softer Top 40 hits and rock oldies. In addition, contemporary artists who recorded adult-appeal music, such as The Carpenters, Bread, The Fifth Dimension, Barry Manilow, Anne Murray, Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy, Barbra Streisand, and John Denver, began to be played more often on Top 40 radio. Much of the music recorded by singer-songwriters such as Carole King, Carly Simon, James Taylor and Janis Ian got as much, if not more, airplay on AC radio than on Top 40 stations. Easy Listening radio by then had also begun to open its airwaves to artists who had begun in the rock and roll or R&B fields, such as Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond, Diana Ross, and The Vogues, along with individual singles released by the former Beatles (such as John Lennon's "Imagine" and George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord"). Once again, there was a good amount of crossover between the Easy Listening and Hot 100 charts, and many more songs reached #1 on both charts.
Billboard changed the name of the Easy Listening chart to the younger-sounding "Adult Contemporary" in 1979, by which time, like most other music formats, the format had transitioned from the AM dial to the FM dial. Since then, the amount of crossover between the AC chart and the Hot 100 has varied based on how much the passing pop music trends of the times appealed to adult listeners. Not many disco or new wave songs were particularly successful on the AC chart during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and much of the hip-hop and harder rock music now featured on CHR formats would be unacceptable on AC. But in the 1980s and 1990s and into the new millennium, artists like Elton John, Cher, Hall & Oates, Mariah Carey, Rod Stewart, Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, Regina Belle, Peabo Bryson, Eric Clapton, Melissa Etheridge, the Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, and Shania Twain appealed to both CHR and AC listeners. More recently, AC radio has come to embrace more artists and songs from the softer side of pop rock and alternative rock, from artists such as Sheryl Crow, Kelly Clarkson, Daniel Powter, Natasha Bedingfield, Lifehouse and James Blunt.
Crossover from the country charts has also been common on the AC chart since the chart began. Among the country stars who had a number of singles cross over to the AC chart (and the pop chart as well) from the 1960s through the 1980s included Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, Eddy Arnold, Roger Miller, Ronnie Milsap, Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt, Crystal Gayle, Willie Nelson, and Juice Newton. The huge growth of country music as a radio format in the 1990s brought a number of new country crossovers onto the AC airwaves, including LeAnn Rimes, Shania Twain, Faith Hill, Lonestar, Lee Ann Womack (whose "I Hope You Dance" reached #1 AC as well as Country), and Garth Brooks. More recently, a new wave of country performers has been crossing over to AC, including Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, the Dixie Chicks (who topped the AC chart with their cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide"), Martina McBride, and Rascal Flatts.
The Contemporary Christian music market has also been relatively successful in crossing over to mainstream radio. In the mid-1980s, one of the biggest CCM artists at the time, Amy Grant, crossed over into secular music with the 1985 single "Find a Way," which became a Top Ten AC hit and a #1 Christian single simultaneously. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, while Grant continued to enjoy AC success, other artists such as MercyMe ("I Can Only Imagine"), Chris Rice, Natalie Grant, Kathy Troccoli, and Michael W. Smith (who had a Top Ten Hot 100 and AC hit in 1991 with "Place in this World") have crossed in between the Christian and secular worlds with little disapproval from their fan bases.
