Creativity Quote by Michael Bolton

Bolton’s line is a soft jab disguised as a shrug, and it lands because it treats an industry overhaul like a minor vocabulary dispute. “Recurrent airplay” is the kind of phrase only a business trying to launder its own habits would invent: clinical, spreadsheet-friendly, and conveniently bloodless. When Bolton says “we used to call it…when someone had a hit,” he’s puncturing the euphemism. The old term is blunt and human. The new one sounds like a symptom.

The intent isn’t just nostalgia for radio’s heyday; it’s a critique of how gatekeepers reframe success to keep control of the story. A “hit” implies collective desire, an audience voting with attention. “Recurrent” implies programming strategy, a managed loop that belongs to the station, the label, the algorithm. Bolton is pointing at the quiet shift from culture as a moment to culture as an asset class: catalog value, reliable rotation, monetizable familiarity.

The subtext is also self-aware. Bolton’s career sits in that sweet spot where “the hits” became a brand, then a punchline, then a durable back-catalog that never really leaves. He’s not pretending purity; he’s highlighting how the system now treats that durability as a product feature. In an era where streaming and “throwback” formats stretch the lifespan of a song indefinitely, his joke doubles as a warning: when the language gets bureaucratic, it’s usually because someone’s trying to make the magic look like math.