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

No, it's about money and pop culture, not class. She's not working class and doesn't claim to be. Often I'm as annoyed by misreadings from people who like it as I am by ones from people who hate it. It's not a simple binary at all.

how is "counting dollars on the train" or w/e not working class?

i must admit i hate the song and everything that it represents with the white hot heat of 1,000 suns but i think it's pretty fucking convenient that it seems to be so widely "misinterpreted"...like literally every time it pops up on facebook or i see youtube or comments on an article that's how people are interpreting it, and that's how i interpret it....but somehow it's defenders want to believe that everyone else is wrong with the simplest and most obvious answer is that everyone, the haters and the mass of its fans, are interpreting it exactly as it is.

This is interesting: "Drunk in Love" is now the #1 streaming song, but that's only good for #12 on the big chart.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/01/22/lordes-royals-the-go-go-version/

xp Money is not the same as class. Simple. I grew up without much money of my own, very much counting my pounds on the train, but I'm still middle class. I'm addressing Perp's miscategorisation there, not your hatred of the song.

wasn't there some poll not long ago that found that like 80% of ppl considered themselves middle class?

Plus, middle and upper class folks may be more likely to dismiss the trappings of money and pop culture as did Lorde, as they have always had more than working class folks

also maybe bc they can signal status in more subtle (+ often more expensive, eg 60 grand graduate degree mannerisms) ways

I've always read it as about being the listener rather than the performers, ie "I wish I heard different messages on the radio" (cf the Smiths: "The music that they constantly play says nothing to me about my life") as opposed to "Rappers shouldn't buy themselves nice cars". But yes, it's a lower-middle-class bohemian POV.

the brute-force Importance of new sites that just happen to have a lot of money and the ability to throw it around in ways that generate traffic is maybe my least favorite development of this decade. like, why should people care about such a wrongheaded and ignorant argument? well, because lots of people read buzzfeed. because it has audience manipulation science on its side. just, ugh, gahhhh.

(you too grantland)

This is interesting: "Drunk in Love" is now the #1 streaming song, but that's only good for #12 on the big chart.

― The Reverend, Thursday, January 23, 2014 5:47 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

so what does this mean? wasn't the thread thesis that including streaming songs was creating these new results?

There's no way it's the streaming songs creating these results. To the people that think they are, what song by a black artist would have gone #1 if streaming wasn't included?

there's really not enough data to make any real conclusions yet. it's been a year! everything right now could be a blip

i think it's possible that streaming helps songs by black artists get onto the hot 100 when they wouldn't have otherwise (also known as the vine phenomenon) but also puts a cap on how high they can go because streams by memes (harlem shake, what's the fox say) and white pop artists (miley etc) end up crushing them in numbers

to me the most important test case for black music and the modern pop charts is "adorn," which was pre-streaming rules but was the biggest r&b radio hit OF ALL TIME and still peaked at #17 on the hot 100. something is wrong there.

Yep. And "Love on Top" a few months earlier.

I definitely think there are other factors at play here—the drop-off seems to be around the time Flo Rida came on the scene (he was probably America's most popular MC until Macklemore came along). But I also think (and someone with more chart knowledge can correct me on this) that depending on the number of streams being accessed, being "#1 on streaming" by itself might not carry as much weight as being #1 on radio, or in sales—so a song can top the streaming chart but not have as many chart points as, say, a track that's #5 on radio. This is why things like "Gangnam Style" and "Harlem Shake" went so bonkers—they were much wider phenomena that had much more to do with sharing the communal experience of A Thing In Culture Right Now than they did the simple enjoyment of a song.

Also re radio trumping streams: Did someone link that WSJ piece about radio being narrower already?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303754404579313150485141672

"The most-played song last year, Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines,' aired 749,633 times in the 180 markets monitored by Mediabase. That is 2,053 times a day on average. The top song in 2003, 'When I'm Gone' by 3 Doors Down, was played 442,160 times that year."

when god puts me in hell he is going to force me to listen to "When I'm Gone" by 3 Doors Down 442,160 times in a row

when god puts me in hell he is going to force me to listen to "When I'm Gone" by 3 Doors Down "Blurred Lines" 442,160 times in a row

oh my god, I'm already in hell

HEY HEY HEY

I think the thing I'm angriest at "Blurred Lines" for ruining "Firestarter" for me

Failing to see the connection/resemblance (in cases like this, it's usually pretty obvious and right in front of me).

well you just wrote "HEY HEY HEY" and I thought "oh, 'Firerstarter'" but "Blurred Lines" went through my mind instead and I went ;_;

Oh, right. Anyway, here's a fact about me, the "Firestarter" video was the first music video that scared me when I was young.

For the purposes of Billboard, "streaming" means services like Spotify, Pandora, etc. Youtube views are tracked separately. "Drunk in Love" is only #13 on THAT chart, which is currently topped by "Wrecking Ball" (STILL).

damn youtube viewers love miley

does this wrecking ball version count towards it?
http://youtu.be/6xljA6zJn4I

the 'on demand songs' chart is what tracks spotify/pandora/etc. 'streaming songs' includes all of that + youtube/vevo/other video streaming sites. streaming songs is the hot 100 component chart (along w/ digital, radio), while on demand is a subset of it.

I dunno what that Ron Jeremy business is, but "Wrecking Ball" returned to #1 after Lorde's 9 week reign because of some parody video.

Is there a limit to how long a stream needs to last before it's counted? Like if a million people click on a video and watch it for 30 seconds and shut it off, does it still count?

Folks were wondering about that question a year ago, and I still don't know the answer

to me the most important test case for black music and the modern pop charts is "adorn," which was pre-streaming rules but was the biggest r&b radio hit OF ALL TIME and still peaked at #17 on the hot 100. something is wrong there.

something is wrong with r&b radio or r&b itself right? unless adorn is really the greatest r&b song of all time?

Are you a weirdo who doesn't like Adorn

Not even a top 5 song on Kaleidoscope Dream tbh.

At least we once saw crossovers like Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You," an even bigger R&B hit that actually sat in the Hot 100 top five for a while.

Not even a top 5 song on Kaleidoscope Dream tbh.

― tsrobodo, Friday, January 24, 2014 11:00 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yup

At least we once saw crossovers like Mary J. Blige's "Be Without You," an even bigger R&B hit that actually sat in the Hot 100 top five for a while.

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 24, 2014 6:53 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Adorn" actually did break "Be Without You"'s record for weeks topping the R&B airplay chart, but since the main chart stopped being mostly airplay in the middle of "Adorn"'s run it's not reflected as a Billboard record. the real difference is that "Be Without You" was also #1 on Pop Songs (and all-genre Radio Songs chart). "Adorn" peaked at #35 on Pop Songs and #9 on Radio Songs.

Is there a limit to how long a stream needs to last before it's counted? Like if a million people click on a video and watch it for 30 seconds and shut it off, does it still count?

i don't think billboard has answered this question specifically yet, but they did count basically every view of those harlem shake videos, most of which were only 30 seconds long, so yeah, it would seem that 30 seconds is sufficient

Yep. And "Love on Top" a few months earlier.

"Pretty Wings" too, number one R&B for 3 months in '09 (second only to "Be Without You") but only made it to 33 on the Hot 100.

MASSIVELY important new post here:

http://dtownsteez.tumblr.com/post/75090773209/some-charts-i-thought-might-be-important-reference

Just came here to post that.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/eee0dc1afb0cd496550ef2bbdc46da4c/tumblr_n07equ8WkQ1rk11n7o1_1280.png

http://24.media.tumblr.com/ac7ee002f404a6b17d50fa5589168cd8/tumblr_n07equ8WkQ1rk11n7o2_1280.png

yeah, that's pretty interesting. curious what that looks like if you go back further. also wow at 1993, i would not have guessed that that was the peak year (might've guessed 2004 though). bottom drops out well after hot 100 includes itunes data (not that that couldn't be a lagging indicator or something). curious what happens w/ 2008 - is it just edm? i can remember over a decade ago britishes wondering why dance music couldn't break thru, why didn't american kids go to clubs and dance and arguing that american kids did go out to clubs and dance, it's just that over here dance music is (or was) hip-hop and uptempo r&b. maybe edm was a disruptive innovation.

well, 1993 will look bigger because Soundscan had really kicked.

i guess but seems like soundscan's effects would be tempered by the way hot 100 is calculated (though i'm guessing we're seeing some delayed effect of radio reacting to the discovery of just how popular hip-hop actually is)(ie most of the last top 40 holdouts had yielded and you could have ice cube and snoop on pop radio, not just hammer). i still think >70% of yr pop chart to be composed of hip-hop/r&b is a ridiculous norm to expect but i have to admit i had thought that that early 00s moment of hip-hop/r&b dominance was a bit of an anomaly and that the recent trend was if not a regression to the norm, then perhaps not as drastic a turn historically as some of the thinkpieces would have it but no, that's some kind of paradigm shift going on there and it's weird cuz when you look at the huge systematic things that have effected pop music in the past twenty years - telecommunications act of 96, the death of music videos on television, itunes and the rise of mp3s, the rise of streaming, general billboard hijinks - none of them seem to be the easy thing you can point at here (not that they aren't or couldn't be factors, just you can't point at them as some sort of extinction level event in the fossil record or whatever). not sure how much was a shift in fashion toward a genre w/ not a ton of african american artists in it or how much is white kids having a number of their own shitty white rappers they can listen/relate to instead now (ie benzino was right!) or really what you can point at. the elephant in the room of course is the first thing anyone thinks of when asked 'ok what happened in america in 2008?'

haha THANKS OBAMA

hey guys it's david (the guy who wrote that billboard hot 100 trends post). somebody pointed this thread out to me. anyways, if you have any questions about my methods or w/e feel free to ask.

welcome! you did excellent work! (this is al shipley btw)

yeah really interesting graphs. (shakira counting as a POC but not aguilera seems a bit arbitrary to me - because she's not american she's "more" latina than an american latina woman? - but as you say it wouldn't make a huge difference to the data.)

i get the impression that the crux of this lies in stuff which is subtly unmappable: genres like rap and r&b only finding crossover success via white artists (doing either safe, retro iterations of it or trying to distance themselves from it) while black megastars like rihanna chart with dance and pop...

Shakira is half Lebanese, half latina so idk about calling her "white", but that's a minor point in a really interesting analysis.