Itunes, Billboard, and the marginalization of black music and black audiences in America

I was rather astonished by two things I noticed in Rihanna's discography:
1.) Rihanna has had a release every year since 2005 (in 2008, she released Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, which itself had new singles)
2.) Rihanna's relevancy has -increased- since her debut.

She has evolved from a one hit-wonder to a rising star to proving she could maintain her shine to now kicking back as she joins the ranks of Madonna and Michael Jackson as a pop legend. For when you listen to Rihanna (and great pop music), you are listening to her persona. This is the appeal. The songwriting takes a backdrop to the personality, just as it did for Madonna and Michael Jackson. Just as these legends reflected the times, Rihanna does for ours.

Who is Rihanna?

What is considered the zeigeist of the current digital age?

Multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, un-aware vagueness.

Her lyrics seemingly draw material from several lifetimes (think to how many different songwriters have had their stories told through Rihanna's persona); these lyrics reflect upon multiple relationships which are evaluated in a sublime light. We don't know her, just like we don't really know Robert De Niro or Marilyn Monroe. Like an actress, Rihanna evokes powerful emotions requiring substance beyond typical human-capacity. How does she respond to this demand for infinite substance?

She stays silent. Sure, the minute she talks, the appeal is gone; but if she finds a way to leave the public wanting more (through mystery), she becomes the center of the conversation. It's simple logic -- you create the illusion that there's something -more- and it results in hype about what that something is. Rihanna is the latest to come along with her spin on this; except, as a direct product of a music system which has been at practice for over half a century, she is heavily-coached by people who have "Hype 101" mapped out in precise formula.

Rihanna is the end of pop music from the major label industry. At this point, all known major sounds have been recycled time-after-time; Rihanna is the dying roar of a Tyrannosaurus Rex -- powerful, but powerless against an asteroid. The industry's long-adapted to the pitfalls which came from presenting a flawed human upon a pedestal, claiming them to be flawless, and Rihanna is their magnum opus. In this metaphor, the internet is the asteroid and the prehistoric recording industry stands no chance -- regardless how many teeth.

Anyone who doesn't believe this need simply look at how many #1 singles Rihanna has had in such a short-period of time. It might be said that the industry has just been one gigantic attempt to artificially recreate Beatlemania, but without all that lyrical "rebellion" and musical "abstraction". Keeping the hype and removing any trace of challenge, Rihanna's music captures a sublime in-between space that has millions fascinated.

So in the age when everyone has their OWN pedestal, it is almost impossible to not be somewhat vein. Furthermore, when you look around and see that everyone else ALSO has their own pedestal, this vanity becomes even easier to believe in. So if everyone's already high off their own self-made hype, how does a industry of veteran hype-makers respond?

They give it their all, building a pedestal so high we're too busy admiring its scale to notice Robyn Rihanna Fenty didn't actually build this thing -- "Rihanna" did. It is coming from an unnaturally perfect plane of perspective, high in the clouds. She's standing miles above us and from way down here, none of us can make out who it is EXACTLY at the top of that pedestal, but plastered on the front is a massive projection of her fabled image.

This is what it is like listening to Rihanna. You can critique it by calling out the manufactured origin of the project, but if you suspend your disbelief and look at the project in another manner -- her success is a collective effort. Yes, her branding is calculated more meticulously than tomorrow's stock market and yes, this creates a "robotic"-like atmosphere, but her success requires the suspension of disbelief. This wondrous pedestal of stone which Rihanna sings upon is not really stone at all -- instead a bizarre, transparent hologram. When we forget this fact and let ourselves go, what's left isn't a hologram at all, but something very tangible and personal. -Personal- because we are humans and this is a perfect human image magnified to the level of a God from myth -- it reminds us of our inner-beauty, our inner-perfections and our higher potential.

Shine bright like a diamond!

xp that's very interesting some dude, i had never considered that re: derulo. but yes i think you are right that i am probably trying to make things simpler than they are

lmaooo i c/p'd part of that to see where it came from and OF COURSE it's rateyourmusic

It isn't Lefsetz?

i've been waiting for an opportunity to defend diamonds for a long time and i finally had my chance

let's 51 this motherfucker, people

stfu sleeve

I'm gonna end every post now with "Shine bright like a diamond!"

Shine bright like a diamond!

I'm still waiting for her to release a collaboration with Electric Six who have also consistently released an album each year since 2005, though 2012's was a live album.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/business/media/tweets-about-music-to-get-a-billboard-chart.html?hpw&rref=technology

oh man

MJ and Madonna had career-defining images but I don't agree about the songwriting taking a back seat, I'd say at the height of their powers the songs and the image were in perfect harmony w each other in their own idiosyncratic ways this is why they are legends.

is it april 1st already?

No, that's Tuesday of next week

Shine bright like a diamond!

"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/business/media/tweets-about-music-to-get-a-billboard-chart.html?hpw&rref=technology";

This already exists -- it's existed for at least 1 year

http://www.billboard.com/charts/social-50

social 50 is for ranking artists' social media presence while this new thing appears to be about tracking how much online chatter songs, not artists, are generating. plus this will be updated real-time as opposed to the social 50 which is updated weekly.

hmmm, well, I dunno. When Twitter tried to do that, what ended up happening was it looked just like that Social 50 chart. The reason being there are more people talking about Top 40 than say, DJ Rashad.

They should just collaborate with the NSA and get a definitive list of what everyone listens to on their phone. Give it a nice patriotic name like "The Freedom 50".

Total Entertainment Awareness

and this man to run it:

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=99442#unread

Chris Molanphy goes IN. Major, must read piece.

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9378-i-know-you-got-soul-the-trouble-with-billboards-rbhip-hop-chart/

Chris on FB about it:

"Papa's Got a Brand-New Bag." "Rescue Me." "Mr. Big Stuff." "I'm Every Woman." "Sexual Healing." "I Feel for You." "I Need Love." "Me, Myself & I." "All Around the World." "Real Love." "On & On." "Work It." "What You Know." "A Milli." Classic songs—and all of them only went to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart—a list that was once truly distinct from the Hot 100 pop chart and was the authoritative ranking of the music of black America.
This piece—on the long, tangled history of that chart—is my first major feature for Pitchfork since last fall's Modern Rock/Alternative megafeature and, incidentally, is the longest article I've ever written. I needed the space to explain how the chart developed, how this chart was saved from irrelevance in 1965 and became the authority in black music for decades, and how the era of digital music has made it a challenge to track what true fans of R&B and hip-hop are consuming, week in, week out.
The piece is also—a year and a half after Billboard changed the way the chart is formulated—a polemic, from a diehard chart fan who feels the R&B/Hip-Hop chart needs to be fixed. A purported R&B/Hip-Hop chart topped by white people 44 out 52 weeks last year has issues—and even now, when topped by Pharrell, the chart is nothing more than the Hot 100's truncated stepchild

It's a really outstanding if depressing summary.

The worst counter-argument I've heard – I've heard it on campus whenever I bring it up to students at the radio station - is that it's a good thing "boundaries are falling." It's a weaker iteration of the reverse racism line.

On one hand we're asking billboard to provide information the labels clearly have little interest in, or else they would. On the other, as long as they do have these worthless, editorial-based sub-hot 100 charts, they acting under the vanity that they ARE providing that information.

it's not really that Billboard is hiding any info they used to publish, they've just pushed it off to the "R&B/Hip-Hop (or insert whatever genre here) Airplay" charts while altering the nature of the main genre charts people generally look at. i've pretty much only regularly looked up the airplay-only charts for the last year because i still have that option and i learn something about what hit songs are trending beyond 'yes people are still buying that one Eminem song.'

Yeah I don't think anyone said they're hiding anything

I'm referring to the info Chris suggests would be worthwhile at the end of his piece re demographics and the net, not airplay data

ah ok misread your post

The tragedy is an industry's acceptance of itself as a mere subset of an ad-driven Internet economy. Psy at #1 of the rap chart is mostly just a farcical aftermath.

obviously a fantastic piece but the idea that there is no "black youtube" is insane in a world where someone as entrenched in major label pop as nicki minaj is dropping a video exclusively to world star

that said there have been enough rumors about worldstar view counts being fishy and/or purchasable that i'm not sure billboard could reliably count them. but it's a really weird thing to ignore if you're in the business of attempting to accurately tabulate the music that americans consume online.

Well the exact line from Chris is:

Sites like WorldStarHiphop let you stream both mainstream and underground videos, but they don’t sell enough stuff to be helpful to Billboard.

So, you got me?

well youtube doesn't sell anything either so i'm not sure what that means

What does he mean by sell in a world where a singer debuts in the top 10 one week and is out of the hot 100 the next, based on practically no sales but from scoring a viral ad? Unless its the conceit that the song must be purchasable, even if sales are infinitesimal compared to streams (and not even streams of the song per se).

Referring to Soko, in case you haven't heard.

So like, people click on a commercially unavailable freestyle for the freestyle and that doesn't count, but people click on an ad that just happens to be scored by some nonsense and congrats on your top ten single!

even if he means that worldstar's streams are dwarfed by youtube, i would argue that he's wrong.

nicki's "lookin ass" video debuted on worldstar and currently has 15m+ views http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhCBBlBm0S8jCdjaY9

considering the overall point of his piece that seems like a weird thing to just sweep aside w/ a parenthetical

that's double the amount of views it has on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwNbTL3pOs

amazing article. learned a lot from it about things that i sorta knew but didn't really understand re: how changes in the industry in the 80s and 90s affected the charts.

the problem is that Billboard relies on data reported by retailers and radio stations and they had an incentive to give up that data because they got something useful out of the charts. you could theoretically make some amazing new charts out of data collected from spotify, iTunes, and youtube, but what incentive do those companies have to give out that information? they don't have to make decisions about what records to stock or which songs to add to their playlists, so they might as well just keep the data to themselves and sell it to advertisers or whatever. basically the very idea of charts seems to be useless to the new digital music industry.

If there's any one image that best sums up the ridiculous consequences of Billboard's R&B/rap chart changes it's def this:

http://ll-media.tmz.com/2014/02/25/0225-billy-ray-cyrus-3.jpg

the problem is that Billboard relies on data reported by retailers and radio stations and they had an incentive to give up that data because they got something useful out of the charts. you could theoretically make some amazing new charts out of data collected from spotify, iTunes, and youtube, but what incentive do those companies have to give out that information? they don't have to make decisions about what records to stock or which songs to add to their playlists, so they might as well just keep the data to themselves and sell it to advertisers or whatever. basically the very idea of charts seems to be useless to the new digital music industry.

― wk, Monday, April 14, 2014 6:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude...ALL of those organizations give data to Billboard. and generally retailers and radio stations haven't really had to be incentivized to manually give Billboard data since the advent of SoundScan, BDS, etc. 20 years ago.

how much of that data do they really give? like are they providing billboard w/ nearly as detailed a demographic breakdown as they are their clients or are they just 'well here's what got played and how much'?

yeah, I doubt they give much more than what's already publicly visible. play counts basically.

I guess it depends on what billboard's main purpose is supposed to be. If the point is to collect data and sell it to the music industry, that doesn't work with the digital music industry who already has better data of their own (and obviously isn't concerned with where to allocate shelf space or airtime). But if billboard's main purpose now is entertainment journalism for the fans and critics to enjoy the inside baseball of the industry, then I don't see how these tech companies are going to give up the useful data that would give us interesting automatically generated charts like the top power electronics albums in the midwest or whatever.

And Mr. Molanphy discusses the issues in his article some more with SFJ

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2014/05/fixing-the-billboard-music-charts.html

…as John Legend replaces Pharrell at the top of the Hot 100...

the problem is obviously about more than just what tops the chart... besides, the likely next #1 is iggy azalea

enjoyed the molanphy/sfj thing and chris as always has great insights. his idea of having R&B/hip hop 'super users' to be a nielsen family to provide digital sales/streaming data for certain charts is interesting although i kinda wonder if it's actually feasible. i really just feel like it wouldn't be that complicated to recalibrate the genre charts so airplay is weighted more, and kind of borderline acts like Macklemore only appear on the genre charts if they get enough R&B radio spins, like Lorde or Katy Perry's crossover songs did.

yeah, i've also been wondering how feasible figuring out who comprises the 'super users' group would be. if identifying them involves finding who mostly buys hip-hop and r&b, it means defining the group would involve coming up with some initial definition of what songs qualify, which billboard has already proven can be quite a messy business for them. maybe could just use id3 tags? in any case my gut is that it's a clever solution that would be harder to actually do than it appears.

your idea about just shifting the airplay-to-everything-else ratio and only allowing songs that achieve a certain amount of urban radio play is interesting too. that actually has a parallel in how billboard did their old 'pop 100' chart, which in retrospect seems like it only existed because certain people were getting uncomfortable with seeing so many hip-hop and r&b acts at the top of the charts all the time. basically they compiled the chart by weighting sales more heavily and by shrinking the radio panel to just top 40 stations, but even then lots of r&b and hip-hop songs were charting highly, so the june after they made the chart, they added an additional rule that songs weren't eligible until they were getting at least 100,000 audience impressions on chr OR they reached the top 10 on hot digital songs. (source: the last question on this ask billboard column, which is honestly a bit cringe-inducing in its use of phrases like 'true pop music' to describe madonna and girls aloud but NOT r&b).

in the end they discontinued that chart after it started becoming irrelevant b/c top-40-leaning, sales-driven hits on the hot 100 became the norm again, but it's pretty interesting that for so long they were actually basically bending over backwards to give 'whiter' music a better chance on their charts.