Contemporary Hit Radio didn't die in a dramatic explosion. It bled out slowly, starting with streaming in the late 2000s. Now, in 2025, the format has flatlined.
The numbers tell the story.
As early as 2020, ‘CHR: Contracting Hit Radio’ by Edison Research highlighted the steep decline of Top 40 radio in the U.S. The study noted that CHR’s total-week share in Nielsen’s PPM markets had fallen since its 2014 peak, dropping from 8.1% in 2016 to 5.5% in 2020 - a 32% decline in just four years.
Another interesting insight comes from Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media, who points to the number of stations by format - with CHR slipping.
“Note that the top format in the U.S. is Country with 2,172 stations in its community. And Top 40 cruises in #10, the last position on this chart with a mere 575 stations – and falling. Since last September, the format is down nearly 2% (and 3.5% for 2024)”
In Australia, Hot AC and Classic Hits formats are now dominating. The CHR networks that once ruled the world, are dismantling their own brands just to survive.
I've spent my career building CHR brands in Australia and now co-host Game Changers Radio - a podcast about the broadcast industry. I witnessed these stations at their peak, first hand.
Contemporary Hit Radio was the crown jewel of radio formats. Guaranteeing large audiences and consistent ratings dominance. The heartbeat of pop culture, built on consensus: one chart, one culture, one set of hits everyone loved.
CHR was defined by stations like Fox FM and 2Day FM in the late 1990s and 2000s, and later by NOVA in the 2010s. Straplines like “[City]’s #1 Hit Music Station” and “Fresh Hits” positioned them clearly as the destination for the hottest hits.
They were embedded in the fabric of the city and stood out with big cash contests, headline-grabbing stunts, killer production, catchy jingles, superstar breakfast teams, and unforgettable moments with the world’s biggest artists helping cement the station's influence on music culture.
To this day, The Fox in the noughties stands as the best-executed CHR station in the world.
Record labels courted us with five-star dining, business-class trips, endless backstage passes, crates of concert tickets, meet-and-greets. Our influence was so powerful that a throwaway comment about needing a new washing machine could see one delivered the next day, with a song-title tie-in.
But a cluster of chronic conditions proved fatal.
The core strategy became irrelevant. CHR’s winning edge came from a tightly curated playlist of the biggest hits, spun every 2–3 hours, so within minutes of tuning in listeners heard a song they loved - driving massive cumulative audiences (total amount of unique listeners a station reaches in a week).
Streaming obliterated this advantage overnight with “on demand, any time, anywhere.”
Radio’s tastemaking power evaporated when Old Town Road broke - a country-rap mashup from an unknown TikTok artist that became 2019's biggest global hit without radio airplay.
Gone are the days of radio execs telling labels to "make it shorter" or "add tempo." Powerful ballads like Lewis Capaldi's Someone You Loved were once butchered with dance beats for radio. Now, streaming platforms and TikTok dictate what becomes a hit and what it sounds like.
That shift marked the point when the quality of radio hits began to decline.
For decades, identifying a hit was simple. Music directors relied on a single, consensual view - national sales charts like ARIA, supported by internal research. Now programmers drown in data from Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, Apple, Shazam, Billboard, ARIA - each telling a different story. A song can dominate one platform and be invisible on another.
The era of the universal hit is over.
What about the quality of new music?
The much-hyped 2024 pop resurgence - led by Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Gracie Abrams - never lasted long enough to shape the next music cycle.
The CHR hit pipeline has run dry. Music journalists called 2024 "grim," "brutal," and "the worst it's ever been" - and the charts proved it. Nine songs stayed in the Top 10 for over six months, an unprecedented stranglehold that left critics declaring the Billboard charts "BORING."
"There has never been a time in chart history when songs have stayed on the chart longer than right now”
According to Matt Bailey, who has spent years doing music research for radio.
Matt’s assessment in Where the Hell Are the Hits?, is even more alarming, pointing to just how few true mass-appeal hits have emerged this year.
Chartmetric has gone so far as to call 2025 “underwhelming,” noting fewer breakout tracks, no definitive song of the summer, and raising the question of what even counts as a hit in today’s fragmented landscape.
Luminate backs this up, confirming 2025 as one of the weakest years for new music in recent history, with the fewest new hits on record.
Mass-appeal hits are the lifeblood of CHR. Without them, the format can’t deliver the big audience numbers it relies on - and unlike other formats, CHR isn’t built to drive long listening.
And when there are no hits, there are no songs graduating to recurrent status. Recurrents are CHR's backbone - big hits past their peak that still test well enough to stay in rotation, the glue between new and proven tracks.
The problem: weak currents inevitably become next year's weak recurrents. What was once an overcrowded category now struggles to justify itself - forcing programmers to redo the clocks.
NOVA Entertainment's NOVA network in Australia has made the pivot from a CHR format to a hybrid of current and catalogue. A scan of the Top 200 songs played during a 6am-6pm period in August 2025 shows just 15% were from 2025. Add 2024 and it only reaches 27%.
Almost 75% of the playlist comes from pre-2024.
What was once a CHR juggernaut that prided itself on “Fresh Hits” became “Fresh Hits and Throwbacks”, and now resembles Throwbacks with the occasional Fresh Hit. NOVA has morphed into a variety format, abandoning its core CHR identity. This pattern is spreading globally.
Media analyst Matt Deegan has highlighted Capital UK making the same move.
“Yesterday in the 1pm hour Capital played 15 songs, with just 5 of the tracks released this year and a further 3 from 2024”
“Back on the same day in 2010, Capital played 13 songs in an hour. 10 were from 2010 and the other 3 were from 2009”
So what does the future look like for CHR?
More catalogue-heavy playlists, tight rotations on weak currents filling holes, recurrents stretched beyond usefulness, brands with identity crises, and variety formats flooding the market - or will stations pivot to radical reinvention like 2Day FM in Sydney has done recently?
Either way, CHR's success has always hinged on a strong music cycle, but that’s now entirely out of radio’s control. It was a risk worth taking when the ecosystem worked in radio’s favour. But now?
CHR defined an era. It was the bridge between the analog and digital eras of music culture. It was the greatest radio format of all time.
The Top 40 countdown has now reached zero.
Great piece Irene!
Thank you Tash X