By now you’ve probably seen the graphic on the
Instagram story of every exec at
Ron Perry's
Columbia, spelling out the radio headline of the week:
Peter Gray’s red-hot Big Red team has dominated this week’s
Mediabase Classic chart by scoring the #1 #5, #10, #14 and #20 spots. For those of you still counting on your fingers, that’s five records in the Top 20, all of which are moving up this week. Which is good, right?
With
Harry Styles’ endlessly infectious “Watermelon Sugar” grabbing #1 in only its 11th week on the chart—and the pop icon’s prior #1, “Adore You,” not just holding on but growing at #5 in its
35th frame—it would seem a long and successful path lies ahead for Harry, Peter and top 40 lieutenants
Matt Stevens and
Brady Bedard.
Meanwhile, Columbia's
Powfu leads recent signings at #10, with the supercharged
Jawsh 685 x Jason Derulo at #14 and
Diplo & Morgan Wallen at #20. And with buzz building for the new
BTS single, Columbia promotion’s momentum looks locked in for the coming months.
If memory serves, we haven’t seen one label own five songs with northward movement in the Top 20 of this all-important chart since the days when
Joel Klaiman set up
Monte Lipman’s
Republic assembly line, latterly polished to perfection by
Gary Spangler, who has made “Spangmania” an unstoppable force.
Harry with Big Red's Samantha Brenner, Jim Burruss, Peter Gray,
Brady Bedard and Matt Stevens. Harry even looks pretty in a mask.
Besides Republic’s domination and Columbia’s enormous current run, we’ve seen continuing hot streaks in the past year from
Brenda Romano and
Chris Lopes at
Interscope, who will guide DaBaby into the Top 10 this coming week—foreshadowing the charge of
Lil Mosey,
Trevor Daniel x Selena Gomez and
Maroon 5 in the coming weeks.
With Columbia now locked in at the top of the Pop until sometime in September, we will next turn the spotlight on subformat leaders as they endeavor to make lemonade from the lemons dealt us by this pandemic.
As always, this installment of Maybe, Just Maybe is brought to you by the clean, refreshing taste of Mediabase Classic. With fewer calories, less tar and nicotine and a user-friendly interface, Mediabase Classic refreshes the parts other chart platforms can’t reach.
