ATYCLB was a bit more radio friendly, but that album did fantastic on the radio at one point during the height of Elevation there were 4 U2 songs in extremely heavy rotation (Walk On, Elevation, Beautiful Day and Stuck) Beautiful Day is still in many stations Top 100s. It all depends on market. If it does poorly in Wichita, that doesnt mean its not getting played every 5 minutes in Boston, New York or LA. Mid market stations all take their cue from the big boys in the big cities, so it takes a while for that impact to trickle down from say Seattles The End 104 to Gainesville, FL's Rock 104. Vertigo has been pretty standard across the board, but on modern rock stations it averages at least 9-10 spins a day.
Overall, U2 don't have the impact they once did with the younger people and a lot of radio stations are geared towards younger listeners especially rock/pop stations.
I see this album doing as well as ATYCLB on the radio, there are some definite instant "radio" classics or if not classics songs that can do well in heavy rotation. Miracle Drug, Sometimes, and something like Love and Peace (especially when the Trent Reznor mix emerges) are all capable of getting heavy rotation and lots of airplay.
At our station we have had U2 hour every other night for the last week and luckily I've been able to have a hand in the programming. We've averaged at least 10 calls a day for other songs on HTDAAB besides Vertigo and this was before the album was even released.
It's going to do fine on the radio if not surpassing the success ATYCLB did on the radio. The only U2 album(s) that really havent is POP. Zooropa to an extent didnt as well but there was a different atmosphere around that album.
It also depends what time you're listening. It's really easy in the US to gauge how well your favorite band is doing on the radio. If you're listening in the morning thats usually syndicated time for stuff like Howard Stern or your local morning show where those DJs usually have say over what music gets played. Lunchtime is pretty much a standard request hour time, so the time to really listen is probably 1pm-6pm when most people are listening, if you hear the same song at least 4 times in those hours your band is doing extremely well at that station and the demand is obviously there. It's different everywhere, but 1pm-6pm is considered "primetime" after 6 it usually gets segmented as some places will do a request hour or other specific shows. Hell when I worked in SC, we had to do an hour of Metallica every night, and that was fairly (2000-2001) recent too. They may still even be doing it.
