Did anyone else notice how R&B (urban music in general) declined a lot on Mainstream / Pop radio stations in the late 2000s? From 2000 to 2006 pop stations played a lot of R&B and hip-hop music.
The decline started in 2008 or something like that.
Nowadays there's hardly any R&B crossovers, except for the really upbeat songs. The most telling thing is when artists like Usher have to make electropop songs to get pop hits and separate R&B songs to get urban hits, compared to back in 2004 when his R&B singles were hits on many formats - urban, rhythmic, pop/mainstream. The same goes to Chris Brown.
I'm afraid of this situation.
R&B clearly lost some influence airplay-wise in the last years. I don't wanna see talented singers like Usher, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, Mary J. Blige struggling to get crossover hits in the future. I support the musical diversity. Not everything is about dance-pop and electropop - Mainstream / Pop radios seem addicted to that kind of songs at the moment and
the support of Urban radio format only is not enough because it's just one radio format. Pop artists can get airplay from Mainstream/Top 40, Rhythmic, HAC or even AC radio as you know.
So, the questions are:
will R&B make a comeback soon or what? Will R&B singers find a way to slay many radio formats all over again? What needs to be changed? Or this is only a temporary situation?
Discuss.
Especially Dance, which is not pop friendly at all.
