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

my mind is totally being blown

literally no idea lady marmalade or angel of mine were covers!

although the latter goes along with my brilliant business plan of putting together an American girl group and having them release exclusively covers of sugababes/misteeq/honeyz songs and making me a billion dollars

aiken's 'bridge over troubled water' didn't go #1 on hot 100 though 'this is the night' did, his 'botw' didn't chart at all on hot 100, peaked at 29 on ac where 'this is the night' peaked at 13

This was some royalty/ chart manipulation baloney along the lines of "Candle in the Wind '97" being the b-side to some hugely bestselling song nobody knows.

All songs are covers until proven original.

does it count as a cover if the artist had been given the song before the first version was released? iirc (it's in one of the billboard fred bronson books that i don't have anymore) that was the case with "angel of mine," with clive davis deciding she would record it very early on, tho eternal ended up releasing their version in the uk several months before monica's album was released

That's also possibly the case with "Lady Marmalade" tbh

(and definitely the case with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine")

I am looking at my Fred Bronson book and it's not particularly consistent if that was his methodology - for example, Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight & the Pips recorded their versions of Grapevine before the Miracles' version was released, in fact the Pips version was released before the Miracles' version was. But the two singles are noted on the list of remakes as covers of the Miracles song.

They do a good job of capturing the "black person sings it - white person charts with it" type of cover but some of these inter-label things are harder to quantify. If you asked some rando on the street in 1969 they would have said Marvin covered Gladys. If you asked Marvin he would have said fuck no I sang it first.

oops I wrote that whole comment before I saw the last one, anyway yall get the picture

btw did anyone else not know that these were covers?

They long to be close to you - dionne warwick
Rhinestone cowboy - larry weiss
Midnight train to georgia - jim weatherly
alone - (i-ten...?)
greatest love of all - george benson (wut)

i've never actually heard benson's version (it was for a muhammad ali biopic iirc) but that it was the original came up a ton in 86 when whitney's version was unavoidable. may have just been a case of a song hanging around for so long that dj's were running out of things to say about it. can't imagine it sounds radically different. much much younger when they were hits so maybe casey kasem mentioned it w/ them also but 'bette davis eyes' and 'tainted love' are two i always think of when it comes to hits i was shocked to find out were covers.

one of the weirdest ambiguous cases i've seen is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxXhQQYuLhY

you will probably recognize that, if you do, as christina aguilera's "what a girl wants." apparently it was one of the first songs that her label got for her debut album, though the writers had also given it to ophélie winter, whose album came out first (in ~august 1998). amusingly, the xtina and ophélie versions were both released as singles at basically the same time in early 2000, and were on the french charts concurrently (though xtina's version way outpeaked the other and stayed on the charts for more than twice as long).

the snap!/chill rob g thing with "the power" was totally bizarre too

speaking of dying and dead trends...skinny young black models lipsyncing the vocals of their uglier counterparts was definitely a thing for a while wasn't it, let's all take a moment to thank martha wash for suing the shit out of every 90s house group

or skinny white young models in the case of this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXSyQjppqG0
But then maybe not cause the 'uglier counterpart' happened to look like this,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXSyQjppqG0

*er herm*
http://cs301115.vk.me/v301115040/ade/okUjWkl-45c.jpg

Lip-synching models in dance-pop videos are still quite common, aren't they?

there's no pretense that they are the actual vocalists tho

i mean this is what it used to be like:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bb/TechnotronicPumpUpTheJam7InchSingleCover.jpg

and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lOb799cTxM

Last top 10 hit rap song by a black person is "Holy Grail" :(

i almost consider "loyal" more a rap than r&b song, not that that invalidates your point at all

and that only got to #9 anyway

also "show me" def got spins on pop radio even though it didn't quite hit top 10

west coast sound plays pretty well w/ contemporary pop right now

also derulo kinda blurs the line b/w rapping and singing

but even having to pull out these examples highlights the problem

Bring back '90s house. Problem solved.

Love Wamdue but king of my castle is an abomination

lol if 90s house comes back in the us you just KNOW it's gonna be white ppl like kiesza leading the way

Bring back '90s house. Problem solved.

― Cronk's Not Cronk (Eric H.),

It's been back!

for a minute now

Bring back Black Box!

Saw Maxwell on Saturday night and at the end of the show (which was great) he talked a little bit about being surprised by the (solid) turnout, since there were no radio stations in Boston playing his music. Jam'n 94.5 has pretty much become a rhythmic currents station that deigns to play rap not by Jay-Z, while 96.9 considers songs made in 2008 the "throwback jams" that make up its lifeblood. (Playlist.) I'm sure Boston isn't the only market lacking an adult R&B outlet, but it made me bummed out.

there aren't any that I know of in Atlanta either & it sucks. it seems like there would be a market for it here!

that's crazy. there are like 5 stations in the Baltimore/DC area that played "Pretty Wings" and "Bad Habits" when they were new and most of them keep his older singles in permanent late night rotation

atlanta has a very popular adult r&b station. hint: it's the one that's played erykah badu four times in the past four hours and maxwell twice. the one that will regularly play an old deniece williams cut but won't play hip-hop.

my bad - KISS 104 plays adult-oriented r&b in Atlanta incl. Maxwell

xpost

actually take it back about no rap, they played this half an hour ago, it has 'a rap' in it -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U86MVqiKuZE

fucking LOOOOOOOOVE kiss fm. their license used to be out of athens so you could pick it up in athens as well as you could in atlanta. i can remember the summer after i got out of the navy working this third shift job and them buying in whole hog on the whole 'be careful'/'friend of mine'/'when a woman's fed up' saga. they also played the hell out of the temptations' 'stay', which i think was their last hit really. one of the thing i loved about r&b stations when i was a kid that adult r&b stations keep up but normal r&b/hip-hop don't really is there was this real cross generational representation in the playlist and the perceived audience. country has a little of that still but not as much as it used to. it may have just been a side effect of demo disparity in size between boomers and gen x, top 40 when i was a kid would pander as much to 40 year olds as to 13 year olds.

then they traded licenses w/ the fish and now you can barely maybe pick up kiss fm in athens (you can pick up the fish just fine, which was pretty smart of them cuz god knows there are plenty of white xians in this market). i always mean to stream them on my phone when i'm in the car but i usually end up listening to podcasts or fmu or spotify.

i will say that maxwell's mention of there being no r&b radio in this city emboldened me to play 'cold' and some other stuff on wzbc today, so good work on that front i guess

i once met a reggae artist on a bus headed from nyc to boston. it was her first time playing a show there, and she seemed pretty trepidacious about it

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/lecrae-a-christian-rapper-hits-no-1/?ref=music

“Anomaly,” the latest album by the Christian rapper Lecrae, makes its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for the week ending Sept. 14. The album, Lecrae’s seventh, is his first to top the all-genres chart; his last album, “Gravity” (2012), reached No. 3. That said, “Anomaly” is also No. 1 on two other Billboard charts – gospel, which Lecrae has now topped six times, and Christian, where “Anomaly” is his fifth No. 1.

Those placements give the Lecrae another distinction: “Anomaly” is the first album to hold the No. 1 spots on both the gospel and Billboard 200 charts at the same time.

“Anomaly” sold 88,000 copies, significantly less than last week’s top place holder, Maroon 5’s “V,” which reached No. 1 with sales of 164,000. Sales for “V” dropped precipitously, to 80,000, but that was enough to give Maroon 5 a grip on the No. 2 position.

A peculiarity of this week’s chart, Billboard reported, was its volatility: seven of the top 10 albums were new. The most successful of the newcomers, after Lecrae, is Jhené Aiko, whose “Souled Out” reached No. 3, with 70,000 sales.

Alfred wrote a good article about black female r&b singers being shut out

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2014/09/jhen_aiko_marsha_ambrosius_and_ledisi_s_new_albums_reviewed_the_women_shut.single.html

aw thanks

only just now realized browsing the charts today that they never included sam smith on r&b/hip-hop songs even tho "stay with me" has amassed quite a bit of play on such stations (mostly adult r&b stations -- mjb remix helped i'm sure). not that he is sorely missed on that chart or anything, but yet another example of a song they basically decided to exclude that would've ended up charting pretty well there under the old methodology. i guess excluding "royals" seemed like a safe bet initially but after "dark horse" and this it's becoming more and more clear that their decision re: what gets on the chart is less based on what the song sounds like and more on 'is the artist black lol'

otm

this isn't abt the r&b/hip-hop charts but after 17 weeks on the rock songs chart and 6 weeks at #1, tove lo's "habits" has been removed altogether from the rock songs chart. it seems that they allowed it to chart there b/c it was solicited to alt/rock radio early on, similarly to how lorde's "royals" was, to get some early airplay before making the crossover to pop stations. unlike "royals" tho, which ended up getting enough alt play to top alternative songs, "habits" didn't end up doing very well on rock radio, only barely reaching the top 20 on alternative songs (#23 now i think). (of course, it didn't need it, b/c it is doing very well on pop radio now, and is #4 on the hot 100.)

buuut it's interesting to note that billboard is still willing to just decide to remove a song from its genre charts if it becomes to embarrassing to see it doing well. i thought the train song getting removed early on was the only time we'd see that but alas, nope.

honestly i don't understand why they don't do away with the genre non-airplay charts altogether

yeah that's pretty interesting. i was surprised that Billboard let Paramore's "Still Into You" and "Ain't It Fun" dominate the Rock Songs charts for a sizeable chunk of 2013/2014, neither touched the rock airplay charts afaik and i doubt the latter was even worked to rock formats.

i hope there's some 16 year old kid at billboard who tells them what songs "rock" or not

"ahhh, you guys didn't tell me Tove Lo was a girl not a BAND...Paramore is a BAND..."

it's hard to really think of anything as pushing the envelope anymore but it is a little jarring sometimes to put on the top 40 station and and hear all the munchies/high all the time stuff on the Tove Lo song in heavy rotation. definitely thought it was gonna be more of an alt radio thing initially.

Its all about the Aussies. PR email I received:

After seeing the success from his recent collaboration with Australian artist Iggy Azalea, T.I. has partnered up with our client Aussie DJ duo, The Stafford Brothers and dutch singer Eva Simons on "This Girl." ...

The Stafford Brothers' ...can discuss what it’s like working with T.I., how the single came about, how Australian artists are taking over the US music charts with 5 Seconds of Summer going #1 yesterday, Iggy Azalea and now Australia’s #1 DJ duo are about to release their first US single with one of America’s biggest rappers.

The first DJs to sign to Cash Money Records,...

So I remember a while back having some conversation here about how in the 90s r&b/AC crossover was the sweet spot for pop domination. I was looking through the list of AC chart #1s and noticed this: there were a bunch of AC #1s by black artists through most of the 90s, but the only ones between 1998 (when ummm "I'm Your Angel" by R. Kelly & Celine Dion topped that chart) and this year were "Bleeding Love" and a Mariah Christmas track. Interesting how as pop music became dominated by black artists in the 2000s, AC swung hard the other direction. So then the other interesting thing is that this year, after that huge drought, there have been three AC chart-toppers by black artists: "Happy", "All of Me", and "Am I Wrong". Not sure what to make of that, but it seems that particular 90s pop sweet spot may be returning?

bobby shmurda inches into the top 10 this week thanks largely to streaming (#3 on streaming songs) and to some extent digital sales (#20 digital songs). while he's #8 on r&b/hip-hop airplay it's not enough airplay for him to have reached the all-format radio songs chart. http://www.billboard.com/articles/6281818/meghan-trainor-hot-100-tove-lo-bobby-shmurda

so basically the routes to top 10 hits for (lead) black artists so far this year:

(1) ac-ready multiformat songs ("happy," "all of me," "am i wrong")
(2) viral video streaming ("anaconda," "hot nigga," "love never felt so good," "drunk in love" to an extent)
(3) getting a huge shit-ton of urban and rhythmic airplay (#1 for several weeks on at least one but preferably both formats) so pop radio might pick it up ("loyal," "don't tell 'em," "drunk in love" to an extent)
(4) being jason derulo

(5) Pharrell