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

xps Also note that no living American-born black woman has had a top ten hit this decade.

― when a real whiney hold you down, you sposed to drown (The Reverend), Thursday, December 12, 2013 7:28 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whaaaaaatttttt

the magnitude of rihanna and beyoncé's fame really masks a lot, huh

Rihanna's had plenty of top 10 hits, but she's not American-born.

If billboard gives Rihanna credit for #1 singles when she takes 5 min to drop a chorus on someone else's song then I assume Janelle Monae gets credit for that horrible "fun" song that went to #1 too tho and that didn't come out that long ago...her name was on it at least, I've managed to block it out of my mind so someone else will have to confirm

that's a good point, i forgot about JM even being on that. what a depressing caveat anyway, though.

i've only ever heard that fun song outside ie not paying attention to it and i've never worked out where janelle actually is on it

I think she does that "carry me home tonight" part.

yeah that's the part, i think i had to watch the music video to tell where she was in the song

rihanna decidedly more prominent in her 'here, i'll sing the chorus for yr shitty song' appearances than janelle is on that fun song.

Just looked at Billboard's year-end chart. Only one song in the top 20 is by a black performer (as primary artist): Rihanna's "Stay" (at #13):
http://www.billboard.com/charts/year-end/2013/hot-100-songs

a pop ballad!

Y'all are dumping some depressing facts for a Friday evening. Jesus.

The "Jesus" part being for the facts, not for the good work you folks are doing itt.

Top song by a black artist without a white guest artist is #27 (Rihanna again, "Diamonds")

I think it's interesting that not only has this been a precedent year without a black performer as main artist receiving a #1, but that some of the most successful songs of the year have heavily featured black performers. T.I. and Pharrell on Blurred Lines, Aloe Blacc on Wake Me Up, Wanz and Ray Dalton on both of Macklemore's big hits, now Rihanna on The Monster. In particular for Macklemore's hits, these artists provide the hook and most memorable parts of the song, but are completely invisible in wider discussion of the runaway success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis.

relevant: aloe blacc uncredited on "Wake Me Up"

Jody Rosen had the best "instantaneous" response: he pointed out which songs sounded like garbage.

relevant: aloe blacc uncredited on "Wake Me Up"

― katherine, Friday, December 13, 2013 7:28 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

there are no credits on the avicii album tho for whatever reason

i had heard that aloe blacc was on some hit song but i didn't realize it was that gigantic EDM mumford & sons shitpile

Haven't had time to update myself w/ the Beyonce thread yet but any chance Bey gets a song to #1 on the Hot100 before Jan? I know there haven't been official single releases yet + single sales from the album don't start til the 20th

i think some of the songs will chart soon, at the very least. some of the the 30-second previews on her youtube channel are getting a lot of views, and we know from the harlem shake thing that only a short duration of a song actually needs to be streamed in order for it to count to billboard. don't think anything would go #1 though.

yeah -- i think it'll be like the Eminem album, several songs in the top 20 after the release, but one will only go to #1 if radio gets behind it like "Monster."

in fact, now that i think of it, the "superstar release new single to iTunes, it goes straight to #1" phenomenon that used to happen several times a year may be coming to an end. the last #1 debut was T-Swift over a year ago, and this year the biggest debut only got "Roar" to #2 and then it took a couple weeks to get to #1 when airplay and stuff gave it that last little boost.

this is probably related to the YouTube/streaming metrics on the Hot 100 and the fact that iirc iTunes singles sales have finally stopped growing every year.

"Best Song Ever" also debuted at #2 but then fell right away.

heh

yeah -- unlike "Roar" or "Monster," it never got higher than the teens on the Radio Songs chart (One Direction really have only had one big U.S. radio hit, everything else has been driven by iTunes/YouTube).

Why does US radio not play stuff thats actually selling then?

in the case of an act like one direction, it's not that the singles are selling a ton and not getting played -- it's that they have hugely frontloaded but ultimately moderate sales. looking at the first-week sales of a new one direction or justin bieber single has almost always been misleading, so it's not a huge surprise to me that radio is reluctant to hop on board fully w/ these songs. the bieber songs that actually got real radio support (the first 3 singles from believe) managed it partly b/c the sales managed to hang on decently even after the initial surge.

Also, U.S. commercial radio usually only plays what's been actively promoted by record labels. "Get Lucky" put up huge streaming/sales numbers after its release, but the radio stations around here (Chicago) didn't touch it until its radio add date, which was at least a month later, IIRC. (That said, plenty of other stations in the U.S. did recognize the song's popularity and started playing it earlier.)

Chris Molanphy wrote a good thing last year about how radio has always been reluctant with teen pop: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/06/carly_rae_jepsen_justin_bieber_charts.php

Yeah, I hadn't seen that before, but that's a good piece.

the One Direction album is actually not bad -- the best boy band album since 2000.

yeah i enjoy it, but then i was always into "What Makes You Beautiful."

as far as the #1-debut phenom coming to an end... maybe. it seems like promotional schedules are shifting accordingly now that streaming is a big thing for the charts -- more and more singles debuting simultaneously w/ their music videos and so on, or only separated by one week. of course "best song ever" did the simultaneous single/video thing and could only manage #2 despite huge sales numbers and streams, but i think it's only inevitable that some of these will go #1 at some point. like hell, "wrecking ball" was able to jump from #22 to #1 well before it had actually established much radio support.

Chris' article reminds me of how surprised friends get when they learn NSync's biggest Hot 100 hit is "It's Gonna Be Me" and not "Bye Bye Bye" or "Girlfriend."

I was just listening to "Little Black Dress" on repeat as a Bey palate cleanser earlier this morning.

right now the songs on Beyonce's album are all "album only" on iTunes and can't be bought individually, so until they get un-bundled sales won't really effect how her songs do on the Hot 100. she seems to be after proving that something like this can lead to big album sales.

wrecking ball also had miley cyrus naked which is sort of gaming the system in a unique way

just saying

Are there any good articles on why there are so many 'charts' in the US?

Here in the UK its always been sales based. That way its [been seen as] not been decided by pluggers ,labels or stations what gets in a chart. Obviously there's been cheating done in the past.

The public woudnt have it anyother way. It's also why weird songs can sometimes top the chart. I cant imagine commercial radio playing 'o superman' for instance but it sold loads.

re: nsync, "bye bye bye" and "girlfriend" weren't released as cd singles in the u.s. (this was common for teenpop acts like nsync, bsb and britney -- wasn't true for christina, tho). in 2000, cd singles were the only physical format that actually made an impact on the charts from retail, and in 2002 (when "girlfriend" was out), even those were so negligible in sales that the hot 100 basically parroted the airplay chart every week. "it's gonna be me" did have a cd single (it might have been a limited release), which allowed it to jump up to the top for a couple weeks.

i thought "o superman" did become a hit partly thru radio play? at least that's how the popular story goes

U.K. has never factored radio play into the Official Charts, afaik. But radio play (John Peel) probably *influenced* sales.

Are there any good articles on why there are so many 'charts' in the US?

Here in the UK its always been sales based. That way its [been seen as] not been decided by pluggers ,labels or stations what gets in a chart. Obviously there's been cheating done in the past.

The public woudnt have it anyother way. It's also why weird songs can sometimes top the chart. I cant imagine commercial radio playing 'o superman' for instance but it sold loads.

― pfunkboy (Algerian Goalkeeper), Saturday, December 14, 2013 1:12 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we have lots of different radio formats and regional differences and different cultures/ethnicities, and our media isn't controlled by a centralized BBC-type entity?

BBC doesnt control any of the commercial radio stations though.

Also, as I understand it until very recently the single format has always been a much better seller in the UK than in America.

yeah diversity, complexity, and sheer size of us market are why microfocus w/ charts are useful and necessary in a way they aren't w/ an extremely homogenized and small market like the uk. the problem that has arisen for billboard is that whereas before on the retail side they could do some very specific targeting of markets the quasi-monopolization of retail (at least w/ mp3s) has made this much much more difficult. selecting certain record stores as yr bellwether for a genre is simple enough and accuracy is easily achieved there (r&b chart effectively starts as a survey of harlem record stores iirc), doing the same thing when there's effectively only one record store and that record store is also the one record store surveyed for any other chart makes it much more difficult, you're flooded w/ noise. there's an argument that they could've just kept the old model but i can buy that the storefront market (esp when you're talking about the ones you'd target for this) has shrunk so much that the data you gathered there wouldn't be very meaningful. i've thought that if itunes/amazon were willing billboard could target markets geographically but this still wouldn't approach the effectiveness of what they had twenty years ago and would be more problematic obv. in theory they could draw data from trends, using ppl who have focused there itunes purchases on a certain genre be it country or r&b as defining that market, adjusting week by week, but you could imagine ppl freaking out that this was an invasion of privacy or something. us has pure sales based and airplay based charts and while there's the obv fun of the uk charts having surprises and anomalies topping the charts these very anomalies are due to the small size of the market in question and also probably point to some problem w/ the sampling model. us chart model (imo) an easily more accurate model of measuring actual popularity. this is reflected in radio ignoring certain sales hits that have little appeal outside of their fanbase, esp since that fanbase probably isn't listening to the radio but streaming glee/boy bands/indie rock on their phone anyway. also fwiw the uk does have more charts.

while there's the obv fun of the uk charts having surprises and anomalies topping the charts these very anomalies are due to the small size of the market in question and also probably point to some problem w/ the sampling model

One startling thing about the introduction of streaming to the Hot 100 is that it has now started having bigger anomalies than the UK. "Harlem Shake" and "The Fox" both charted higher in the US; Ark Music have never had a song make the UK top 40.

novelty hits /= anomalies! novelty records have been hugely popular since the dawn of billboard. i'm talking more the case of some single topping the charts thru some campaign - ratm, iron maiden. here if some fanbase decided to coordinate efforts and try to drive 'reflektor' or whatever to #1 it wouldn't work unless it was w/ a song or act that was already actually popular. something like blur vs oasis could happen but 'bring yr daughter to the slaughter' couldn't or if it did it wouldn't be a surprise or anomaly cuz it would mean 'bring yr daughter to the slaughter' was already a hit or primed to be one (airplay, etc).

in the case of an act like one direction, it's not that the singles are selling a ton and not getting played -- it's that they have hugely frontloaded but ultimately moderate sales. looking at the first-week sales of a new one direction or justin bieber single has almost always been misleading, so it's not a huge surprise to me that radio is reluctant to hop on board fully w/ these songs. the bieber songs that actually got real radio support (the first 3 singles from believe) managed it partly b/c the sales managed to hang on decently even after the initial surge.

― dyl, Saturday, December 14, 2013 12:43 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This seems to be reaffirmed by the success of their current single. It hasn't left the itunes top 10 since release and as a result radio seems to be steadily picking it up. It's almost top ten on pop radio and already top 40 on radio over all.

as for Beyonce getting a #1 before year ends, the songs won't be available for individual purchase until Dec. 20, so radio play, streaming and/or digital sales would have to be massive, like record breakingly huge to get the #1.