olivia rodrigo sets a record

More records: good 4 u has bigger week on spotify globally than drivrs license or any other track

good 4 u is so excellent and I wish more of this sounded like that. Also I was surprised to see Jam City credited in the production notes!

i was a little surprised too, but he's been showing up in pop production credits a bit more lately, like he was on the (quite good) troye sivan album a few years ago, on a conan grey song (with dan nigro, like on this album), and a few other places over the last few years

weirdly i just found out he played on david byrne's american utopia too

the Dan Nigro thing is amazing too - like, how many of the most perfect songs of the past ten years can he have credits on?

I feel like the hypothetical missing track should come between Favorite Crime and Hope Ur OK… that transition feels particularly soft, and the album could use a final energy bump toward the end.

That said, it’s still a front-to-back listen to me… and I guess better to leave it feeling a little light than beef it up with a weak tune!

.@Olivia_Rodrigo has three songs in the top 10 of this week's #Hot100.

She becomes the first artist in history to chart three concurrent songs in the top 10 all from a first LP.

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) June 1, 2021

Anyone else read this, about fans gaming the charts?

https://www.stereogum.com/2149730/bts-butter-hot-100-billboard-chart/columns/sounding-board/

Relevant graf:

Here’s the thing, though: “Butter” is not the most popular song in America right now. Billboard figures out its charts through some arcane combination of streaming, sales, and radio play. “Butter” made it to #1 almost entirely based on sales of discounted digital singles. “Butter” did get a lot of streams, but it didn’t get as much as any of the three most popular songs from Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album. At radio, the biggest song in America right now is “Leave The Door Open,” the retro-soul soul ballad from Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s Silk Sonic project. There, “Butter” isn’t even a factor.

Fans spending money to buy a new release is not gaming the charts. Including free download codes with concert tickets or hats and counting them as an album sale... now that's gaming the charts.

"Of the 39 titles that went to No. 1 last year [2018], at least 18 were sold as part of ticket or merchandise deals." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/billboard-charts-bundles.html

i did read that stereogum column and definitely agree w/ it, tho he could have gone into much more detail about what these organized stan groups are actually doing nowadays, which is far worse than 'oh the group just sold a lot'. ftr a fan purchasing dozens of copies of the same digital file, then doing the same for each of its remixes, instrumentals, clean versions, etc. etc. etc., contributing to an organized fund of other fans doing the same, meticulously ensuring that not too many copies are ordered per transaction so they'll all 'count' + so forth... IS 100% 'gaming the charts'. like, let's be real, these ppl absolutely would not be engaging in such blatantly wasteful behavior if not for the prospective charting benefit for their 'faves'. yes, more obsessive fans have purchased multiple copies of their favorite artists' releases for a long time, but recently it's gotten to the point where some weeks the MAJORITY of a top-selling title's unit sales are coming from mass-purchasing behavior, which has absolutely never been the case until recently. i honestly do not understand how billboard is not extremely alarmed by the prospect of their flagship chart's significance being diminished to the level of an online poll, as more and more of the chart's top 10 and #1 'hits' nosedive off the list within a month of their debut. whatever gets traffic, i guess!

and honestly, it is almost entirely their own fault, as they've been weighing digital sales far more strongly than their actual (paltry) relevance in the marketplace for years. they started doing this, i suspect, because it seemed 'weird' to them (and interested parties in the industry) that the white pop artists enjoying their advantage in airplay were still frequently being outperformed, because of streaming, by songs w/ comparatively little exposure -- so even tho the unit sales were pathetic, why not give a little extra help to those artists who can still rank well on itunes, i suspect the thinking went.

other factors contributing to this mess: an entire ecosystem of chartwatchers and stans (obviously there's substantial overlap) generating increasingly elaborate (and rather accurate) predictions of forthcoming billboard charts by aggregating publicly available data, then publicizing these forecasts to surprisingly large audiences on social media (twitter accounts adjacent to, like, @chartnews and @popcrave and such). organized stan groups can and do watch these quite carefully to get a sense of what charting outcomes are feasible, then react accordingly (streaming parties, mass-buying, etc.). labels are also well aware that hyper-engaged fans are more than willing to piss their money away by these means, and have thus increasingly offered digital downloads directly through artists' websites to enable fans to purchase as many units as they'd like. (a typical digital download store will only let a user purchase one copy.)

oh sorry i meant @chartdata -- @chartnews is the original that the former account ripped off (and never acknowledged in its media interviews (lol))

i worked adjacent to billboard for a few years & conversed in meetings on a few occasions w/ the ppl (which is like 3 dudes) who run the charts & they take their jobs as stewards of music history very seriously -- it's possible there is meddling from above them at the corporate level that effects the charts but i think that mostly manifests itself in how the charts are presented to the public (paywalls, obtrusive ads etc) as opposed to "we're going to let BTS fans run the charts for traffic." i mean, the rest of billboard does grovel for every crumb of BTS traffic they can muster, so i do understand the suspicion, but in my experience there was a sort of church & state relationship that inoculated the chart team from the rest of editorial there. and that was under a far less journalistically minded leadership than billboard's current owners, i think.

i'm not sure how much of that church & state dynamic is out of some moral obligation to preserve history, honestly, and how much of it is simply because the tabulation of the charts is extremely complicated, and involves various sources/interests that go beyond just billboard (i.e. nielsen). and i think that's really what the issue is here -- changing the way the charts are tabulated is less flipping a switch and more like building an entire new subway line. and dealing w/ stan armies is similar to, like, companies trying to combat ransomware -- the hackers are always going to be quicker, more creative and more nimble than your large institution is able to be. and the stans are essentially engaging in a form of social hacking. billboard can plug one hole (i.e. curtailing the impact of ticket & merch bundles) and another is going to open up. it's a reactive instead of proactive dynamic and the reaction from the charts is always going to be a laborious process given how complicated the tabulation math is for even a single chart

I've seen some of Olivia's stans (aspiring stans?) on Twitter recently, like when she did an "AMA" thing – it struck me as almost cute/quaint that (despite her success/profile) she would have fans using her pic as their avatar, calling her queen, and the whole bit. I guess because she has such an unassuming, "girl next door" image... she's far from a fearsome diva. But I guess every artist deserves a stanbase (for better or worse).

the charts in America are so weird to me, all your different formats etc are so confusing!

Breihan writes, "Organic popularity, once the driving force behind pop music, barely feels like it exists anymore." But before the current era (and especially in the pre-digital days), the charts were driven largely by record companies and radio stations; isn't it better, in some ways, that actual fans have more control than they used to?

The real difference is that the *result* of a big radio push is that a song could become *broadly* popular, familiar to anyone who regularly listened to Top 40, whereas a fan-army mobilization to juke the charts does nothing to extend a song's popularity beyond the artist's fan base. It used to be that anyone could tune into a Top 40 station for an hour and get a pretty good sense of what's ruling the Hot 100; perhaps that's no longer as possible as it once was.

boy do we miss mediation

online stans are fucking psychotic and that kind of anti-social behavior shouldn't be rewarded in any way shape or form.

i understand that this might not be practical, but whoa my god.

meanwhile politely complaining about the new billie eilish song on a message board is very good actually, and should be rewarded with money

I just can't get my head around being so invested in the continued success of global superstar millionaires that you'd spend hundreds of dollars for every single release to push it to the top of the charts. I guess I can understand the appeal of championing an underdog artist or new act and wanting to push them to more visibility with an organized campaign or whatever, but stuff like the BTS army just baffles me in terms of how much money people throw into these campaigns. I'm sure the millionaires who are such ubiquitous global pop stars that they have a McDonald's meal named after them will be just fine, even if Jack Doe in Nebraska doesn't buy fifteen copies of the physical EP and eighteen copies of the same digital single.

Anecdotal (and I may have mentioned this on another thread once), but I was in a Barnes & Noble once and this girl, around sixteen or so, came in with (presumably) her mother. Apparently BTS had just released a physical single or EP or something (it was in one of those oversized cases that they all seem to be released in) and she bought every copy the store had, which I think was 14 or 15. She ran three separate transactions, split between her and her mom and different credit cards (again, presumably something to do with making sure they count). I love music and physical media more than I should myself, but I can't wrap my head around loving any artist enough to buy that many copies of the exact same release.

yeah it's insane.

stan culture is bad regardless of artist AFAICT

Not disagreeing with you Simon, just using BTS as the example given the recent discourse.

And to be clear, I'm not disparaging young fans and people genuinely into pop music. That's fine. It's just the amount of money they must drop on this that stuns me whenever I read about these campaigns. Maybe I'm building a straw man here that doesn't exist, but I do worry about younger, more impressionable fans getting pressured into spending more money than they should/actually have to keep up their true stan status.

I love the grain in her voice... Olivia may be more "limited" of a singer than, say, Billie (in terms of technique), but her voice is so perfect for the big rock ballads and rave-ups that she writes/sings.

(sorry to keep reviving; I'm still bumping this CD on the reg.)

you can tell she's ex-Disney and there's something of the musical theatre in her delivery but it's not a bad thing for her like it often is - little moments like the sarcastic laugh on "good 4 u" or the exaggerated exasperation of "God... it's brutal out here" really elevate this from good songwriting to great pop performance

Exactly - the drama fits (and she no doubt borrowed some of that theatrical expressiveness from Taylor, as well).

I imagine these songs will be really fun to do at karaoke

gonna try that soon, I hope (at a friend's house)

xxxp "like a damn sociopath" and "Ican'tstanditohgodIsoundcrazy"

these are the moments that really make the album for me. songs are good, lyrics are tiresome (admittedly, i am a middle-aged man, they are not for me) but those little moments have drawn me in.

there are plenty of other ex-disney pop stars who don't have anywhere near her charisma

Feeling inspired by @Olivia_Rodrigo ☀️ 

Original photo by Brett Lloyd for Purple Magazine pic.twitter.com/gRIfWlgfxI

— Kyle MacLachlan (@Kyle_MacLachlan) June 8, 2021

there are plenty of other ex-disney pop stars who don't have anywhere near her charisma

― ufo

Multiplying by 0 is still 0.

Jk

Opened this thread to confirm that song is a cover of Misery Business

The song is structurally similar and with similar rock leanings but melodically they're not really and good 4 u doesn't have that hooky riff. Even as a Paramore fan though, I've come to realize I've probably underrated misery business, what a song - "I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE"

I hear only a faint similarity in the chorus (“Good 4 U” is a far far better song, IMO).

I guess I should be more diplomatic and say that the Paramore song is not in a style that I can connect with / enjoy.

It's remarkable how much more pleasant I find the SNL live video of "Good 4 U" than the studio version (at least on YouTube). Sounds like human beings singing and playing instruments in a room. Good power pop tune.

Courtney thinks she owns the concept of a prom queen with smudged eye makeup, f'ing excuse me?: https://pitchfork.com/news/courtney-love-accuses-olivia-rodrigo-of-stealing-hole-album-cover-concept/

they should have credited costello though for "brutal"

― ufo, Thursday, May 20, 2021 9:52 PM (one month ago)

This is fine by me, Billy.
It’s how rock and roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did. #subterreaneanhomesickblues #toomuchmonkeybusiness

— Elvis Costello (@ElvisCostello) June 28, 2021

pretty cool response, can't think of too many in his generation who would've handled it the same way

Just listened to "Brutal"--anyone who thinks that's plagiarism of "Pump It Up" is completely out to lunch. I could easily believe it's nothing more than a coincidence.

I mean my first thought when I heard it was "that's Pump It Up" but it's also a pretty simple riff

I mean, I'm sure at least Dan Nigro has heard the song before and the riff does seem like a quote or homage but that's not a very strong case for plagiarism on its own imo.xp

The song reminded me of "Cannonball" and "Connection" before "Pump It Up," tbh.

it's absolutely close enough to "pump it up" that costello could have sued if he'd wanted to & so it was pretty surprising that they didn't credit him as a precaution, especially in the current legal environment around writing credits

anyone else watch the sour prom thing? it was pretty cool, better than I expected

Finally hit me the other day that the driver license bridge is the melody of the "na-na nanana" playground taunt which is why I've been connecting with it so hard, something about the way she sings of the relationship like it's a taunt in and of itself, combined with this massive emotion makes for the perfect elixir of unreasonable love and the real thing

I thought "Pump It Up" within 5 seconds of hearing it and agree with ufo.

Solid response by EC, tho.

about being surprised they didn't preemptively credit him, I mean.

xxp add it here!: Songs that incorporate the "nan nanny boo boo" melody

it's absolutely close enough to "pump it up" that costello could have sued if he'd wanted to & so it was pretty surprising that they didn't credit him as a precaution, especially in the current legal environment around writing credits

Oh, I agree that court cases have been won over less and an acknowledgment would have been decent.

If Elvis Costello was going to sue over Pump it Up, he would have already sued Escape Club for "Wild Wild West" and U2 for that terrible "Get On Your Boots" song. Granted both of those borrow more from the main melody as opposed to the lead riff like the Olivia Rodrigo song.