Apology Not Accepted

OneRepublic, plenty of apologies

It is not your imagination: you really are hearing “Apologize” by OneRepublic featuring Timbaland all the time. And you probably thought it was Maroon 5 the first 1,000 times it dribbled through the speakers.

According to a Dec. 1 story in the New York Times, the string-laden and lightly remixed ballad, which currently sits at No. 2 this week on the Billboard singles chart, just set a record for the number of times a song has been played on radio stations throughout the country in one week: 10,240 spins.

And one Philadelphia station jammed the thing into its listeners’ ears 123 times one week in November. For those keeping score at home, that is once every 90 minutes on average, or just enough to warrant a perusal of the Geneva Conventions. 

“Apologize” is not a terrible song by any means, although it seems chiefly geared to people who cannot abide the full-tilt rocking assault of The Fray. But is it good enough to warrant such an enthusiastic pummeling from radio?

The short answer is no, but “Apologize” is getting the platinum treatment because it is a music marketer’s dream, a cross-format mélange of hip-hop beats and smooth love-man crooning from what is ostensibly a rock band, featuring grafted-on taps and beeps courtesy of Timbaland. It plays on every format except rock and country stations, and just wait — a lap steel and fiddle remix cannot be far behind.