Hey there! I’m Matt Bailey.

I spent my most recent 15 years overseeing America’s leading callout research firm.

During that time, on-demand music streaming replaced iTunes as the way people listen to music when they want to pick the tunes.

I knew there must be some way for radio to leverage this data. After all, we have access to every single time someone plays a song.

But simply looking at whatever was biggest on Spotify clearly wasn’t helpful.

You’d find hard-core Hip Hop tracks that never became mainstream hits. Tik Tok memes that disappeared overnight. And If Drake or Taylor Swift dropped an album, every single track would top the streaming charts.  

As streaming grew from tech nerds to young Hip Hop fans to the majority of Americans, I knew people were playing the same hits they heard on the radio. There had to be a way to separate the songs just a few rabid fans were streaming incessantly from the songs that lots of listeners know and love, right?

I utilized A.I. to help me analyze the streaming patterns of thousands of songs. Is there a discernible pattern for the songs that are mass-appeal hits for radio?

What I discovered is “Momentum.”

It turns out how big a song is this week is a poor predictor of a song that will have strong familiarity and passion in callout. What really matters is how much listeners keep streaming a song week after week. You may never see these songs topping the streaming charts, but you will see them topping your callout. 

Your Hit Momentum Report leverages this discovery to find the songs listeners keep playing week after week. I designed Your Hit Momentum Report to be as easy to use as callout.

Perhaps even easier.

In the meantime, I spend a lot of time analyzing all kinds of hit music. Check out Graphs About Songs, where I take the most important songs in your life and turn them into PowerPoint charts.

So how did I get into radio, anyway?

One night when I was three years old, my dad brought me home a little black transistor radio. It was the waning days of AM Top 40 radio. I tuned to Atlanta’s legendary 79/WQXI.

I was hooked.