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

20 years ago this week the top 10 was:

Beyonce- Crazy in Love
Chingy- Right Thurr
Nelly- Shake Ya Tailfeather
50 Cent- PIMP
Fabolous- Into You
Lil Jon- Get Low
Pharrell- Frontin'
matchbox 20- unwell
The Black Eyed Peas- Where Is the Love
Lumidee- Never Leave You

This week the only Black artists in the top 10 are Rema, Gunna & Nicki Minaj (featuring Ice Spice)

the year of chingy

On the plus side, Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town" (which also reached #1 a couple weeks back) is plummeting like a stone

Beyonce- Crazy in Love
Chingy- Right Thurr
Nelly- Shake Ya Tailfeather
50 Cent- PIMP
Fabolous- Into You
Lil Jon- Get Low
Pharrell- Frontin'
matchbox 20- unwell
The Black Eyed Peas- Where Is the Love
Lumidee- Never Leave You

would poll

xp it may have fallen far from its perch at the top, but it is gaining a lot in airplay at the country format (where it had been struggling pre-controversy) and in general seems likely to stabilize + do much better in the long run than a jason aldean song otherwise would have in 2023

xposts ok i didn't realize that by "21st century whiteness" you meant "country music"

Not sure I understand your quibble. Is Taylor Swift not white?

This is a thread about how white artists have supplanted black artists at the top of the charts. It’s been going on for awhile now, but the invasion of country acts is a fairly recent thing.

I think I just misunderstood your post - I thought you meant "whiteness" as in white supremacy because "Rich Men" and Morgan Wallen are on there

The world-conquering Korean boy band BTS has spoken out directly against sajaegi in the past, and it’s easy to see why. The group’s fans like to view them as insurgent underdogs fighting for truth and virtuousness against a corrupt, dishonest world. In the Korean market, this means viewing them as true artists operating in an industry that revolves around manufactured groups. In America, it means seeing them as freedom fighters who seek to overcome the racist, nationalist gatekeeping that keeps the pop mainstream white and English-speaking. In both cases, it is of paramount importance to both fans and the group themselves that their chart victories are seen as legitimate.

The New Rockism

xp Fwiw, I did too (as opposed to this being the first time four white artists have occupied the top 4 slots, if that is the case/point)

oliver anthony being able to sustain across multiple songs what jason aldean could not does not surprise me

Obviously having a number 1 by a white guy bitching about welfare is a bit different than having the top spots filled with Miley, Timberlake, Katy Perry and Adele or whoever.

the tweet i saw on another thread where OA claimed that the welfare line was about trump -- this was a joke?

Dude probably wasn't remotely prepared for the level of scrutiny and is trying to play it down the middle now

i don't think it's entirely inappropriate to include taylor in an observation abt 'whiteness' at the top of the charts. sure, she is remarkably popular and not rly a 'country' musician anymore... but being white is clearly not entirely irrelevant to her current moment. i hope i am not coming off as disrespectful or rude to say this, but in all the talk recently about how she's enjoying a level of pop superstardom not seen since mj and madonna, the elephant in the room for me has basically been the fact that those two artists had significant numbers of black fans that swift simply seems not to. to me, it would also be accurate to say she's enjoying the biggest level of pop superstardom while also inspiring indifference or worse among most black americans since the beatles

i know some swift fans are a bit insecure about this topic and swear up and down that her fanbase is almost exactly as diverse as the general population so i'll add some qualifiers: yes, of course some black people like taylor swift, certainly casually but also even a lot. i've met a few who like her music much more than i do. but literally all of those i've met have told me, without my having to ask, that the revelation that they like her so much has inspired mockery and other negative judgment from other black people, whereas i've never heard anyone suggest that they felt embarrassed to say they liked madonna because other black people would make fun of them. i don't know what it is -- maybe the country background, maybe all the lyrics about blue eyes in her old music or other lyrical content that some have criticized as a 'preening white princess' routine, but idk, it seems to be real. her audiences at her huge tour dates (including in cities like atlanta and detroit!) appear to be nearly as white as that of an always-and-forever country artist. maybe the american industry just spent the past decade quietly resegregating its audiences and this is the most obvious result of it

it could be that her music fucking sucks!

Dude probably wasn't remotely prepared for the level of scrutiny and is trying to play it down the middle now

Ask him if the Jews did 9/11.

the elephant in the room for me has basically been the fact that those two artists had significant numbers of black fans that swift simply seems not to...maybe the american industry just spent the past decade quietly resegregating its audiences and this is the most obvious result of it

You don't go multiplatinum without having a majority white audience. True for Taylor Swift, true for Beyoncé, true for Kanye West or any other artist you care to name.

If the idea is that Swift embodies a certain kind of whiteness, I guess I would think the week she occupied the entire Top 10 may say more than a week when she happens to have a random old song at #4.

Well, whiteness gets multiple days in sun

Yes but, say, Amy Grant had several big hits in the early ‘90s; Faith Hill in the early ‘00s (just to pick a few rough analogs); and then Taylor herself started racking them up in the late ‘00s / early ‘10s (even pre-1989). So whatever changes happened in 2012 (when this thread started) to push white artists higher on the charts, they surely are not exemplified by someone like Taylor having a hit, that’s not new.

(But sorry I’m also not sure why I’m quibbling over this point)

Taylor doesn’t just have a hit record though. She owns pop music culture basically.

It does support your point (and not mine) that she got a random old song to #3

i don't think one artist owning the whole top 10 on the generally stagnant american singles chart the week her anticipated album came out means that much about anything beyond the fact that that was the week of the album's release. arguably, w/ few consensus hits + the machinery that's putatively meant to bring them to ppl's awareness moving more slowly than ever, a chart based on just a single week's data tends not to 'mean' much nowadays. (yes, i am suggesting that the hot 100 would be improved by using a 2- or 4-week data collection period, even if it were still published weekly.) sometimes all the songs toward the top are actual 'hits' (in the conventional sense) that will actually stick around, but just about as often there are songs taking up space that'll be there only briefly

but yes taylor is obviously huge right now, tho the stronger evidence of that is on the albums chart

+ her touring receipts, etc.

shit, dyl, since you're still here, can you give us a few bullet points on the 5-yr thread gap starting in late 2018? this thread died right around the time streaming became the all-conquering monster--any good pieces out there on Spotify & the marginalization of black music & audiences in the US?

Taylor doesn’t just have a hit record though. She owns pop music culture basically.

Beyonce's stadium tour is doing pretty well also

oliver anthony doesn't just have a hit either. hes connecting across his catalog

Yes, Beyoncé is still a major star, but Taylor has nine albums in the Top 30.

Taylor's got a catalogue saturation thing going on unseen with artists since the '70s, when performers where both more prolific and you'd have stuff happen like the whole Zeppelin catalogue recharting whenever they dropped a new LP.

https://time.com/6307420/taylor-swift-eras-tour-money-economy/

The tour (…) is set to become the biggest tour of all time only a third of the way through its run. (…) a projected gross of $2.2 billion in North American ticket sales alone, and hundreds of millions of streams, reaching a nearly 80% spike in those listening to her music catalog in the weeks after the tour kicked off.

The Eras Tour is projected to generate close to $5 billion in consumer spending in the United States alone. “If Taylor Swift were an economy, she’d be bigger than 50 countries,” said Dan Fleetwood, President of QuestionPro Research and Insights (…)

Yep and B is second and doing ok-

According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, The Renaissance World Tour earned $127.6 million over 11 shows between July 8-30, claiming the largest one-month sum for any artist since the Boxscore archives began in the mid-1980s.

It is sort of interesting that the Beyoncé tour seems to be getting a lot less coverage than the Swift tour. Is that because it's the same set list every night and no special one-night-only guests, so there's not as much of a press hook for every single concert, or is it something else?

The Beatles had Black fans!

a helluva lot. pretty much every soul, funk and jazz act covered the beatles

unless I misunderstood dyl's point

https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/taylor-swift-fandom-demographic

cf: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045222

It is kind of funny to have a poll inform you that the majority of Swift’s fans are white Millennial women.

it is funny to run the data like that, but the thing i learned from that is that, contrary to what people are suggesting itt, taylor swift's fans aren't disproportionately white compared to the general US population. her fanbase is about 3/4 white and 1/8 black, and the US population is about 3/4 white and 1/8 black.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TaylorSwift/comments/i6qawq/experience_as_a_swiftie_of_color/

yes i've seen that link before + was thinking abt it when i wrote that her fans swear up and down that her fanbase does not consist overwhelmingly of white ppl. not sure why ppl showing up to her concerts doesn't line up w/ demographics of the surveyed 'avid' fans (other than maybe the absurd hoops ppl had to jump thru to even get a ticket)

point taken re: the beatles tho! i just named them b/c they had historically been on the r&b charts less frequently than, say, the rolling stones (whose recent giant concert that i attended incidentally also seemed to have an almost 100% white audience)

'that link' being the demographic poll

That survey is kinda weird because the piece differentiates between “fans” (53% of US adults) and “avid fans” (16%), but then only breaks down the demographics of the “avid fans.”

point taken re: the beatles tho! i just named them b/c they had historically been on the r&b charts less frequently than, say, the rolling stones (whose recent giant concert that i attended incidentally also seemed to have an almost 100% white audience)

― dyl,

Sure! But Aretha, Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, EW&F, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Nina Simone, etc. want a word!

It is sort of interesting that the Beyoncé tour seems to be getting a lot less coverage than the Swift tour. Is that because it's the same set list every night and no special one-night-only guests, so there's not as much of a press hook for every single concert, or is it something else

Hmmm. Something else . Washington Post had a huge largely well written article by a writer who cover country music for them on Swift tour and its impact and importance but it had no mention of Beyonce at all. An editor should have encouraged her to drop something in there re Beyonce . Not good. Perhaps with less music coverage now in mass media, and only a small number of Black journalists and editors, the Beyonce tour is getting overshadowed despite it being close in size to Swift.

whether beyoncé's tour is being covered at the same rate as taylor swift's feels like the very definition of first world problems to me. engaging in race war by proxy of two extremely famous and rich touring pop stars who are barely tethered to reality just feels off... those two people have way more in common than they do differences, i have a hard time feeling invested in the idea of beyoncé being wronged by the amount of coverage given to taylor swift. i do think that barbie movie aside the taylor tour is the number 1 one central entertainment focus of the summer for white america and you can see that filtering down thru mainstream publications which are all majority white. i've seen a lot of tweets from older white media members who are admittedly suddenly waking up to the idea that taylor swift is hugely massively popular, it's a bit funny

anyway, from my POV i think part of the dynamic here is that beyoncé long ago was feted as the premiere cultural performer of her generation. what else could possibly be said about her live performances that wasn't already written after homecoming? there is of course coverage to be done of the renaissance tour, but that's more for people who are invested in beyoncé & the intricacies of her career -- how this show is different/better/worse than her previous tours. i think that coverage exists and is pretty thorough. but the kind of coverage the taylor tour is receiving -- zoomed out reckoning w/ the artist's cultural & historical relevance via the live performance -- has already happened w/ beyonce. there's nothing really left to say on that topic. similarly, all the stuff that's being written about taylor this summer won't be able to be written again, even on the occasion of her next stadium tour.

i also think beyoncé has been fairly open in the last 5+ years about her ambivalence towards mass mainstream cultural penetration ... she made a whole album that was explicitly for & in honor of marginalized communities whereas taylor has talked often about wanting to touch every waking soul thru the power of mainstream pop music. she could do anything she wants w/ her music but has pushed further into the direction of pure pop, mainstream radio, TV commercial syncs etc. beyoncé didn't even release a second single from renaissance, never followed thru on the visuals... i think the tenor in coverage also relates to the trajectories each artist has been plotting for years now (and more power to beyoncé for that, she's making way better music)

anyway, from my POV i think part of the dynamic here is that beyoncé long ago was feted as the premiere cultural performer of her generation. what else could possibly be said about her live performances that wasn't already written after homecoming? there is of course coverage to be done of the renaissance tour, but that's more for people who are invested in beyoncé & the intricacies of her career -- how this show is different/better/worse than her previous tours. i think that coverage exists and is pretty thorough. but the kind of coverage the taylor tour is receiving -- zoomed out reckoning w/ the artist's cultural & historical relevance via the live performance -- has already happened w/ beyonce. there's nothing really left to say on that topic. similarly, all the stuff that's being written about taylor this summer won't be able to be written again, even on the occasion of her next stadium tour.

This is all very true. Beyoncé was inescapable a few years ago (something which I found very annoying at the time). Probably my mistake for thinking (fearing) that that would never end (it certainly seemed like it wouldn't at the time). Now it's Taylor Swift's "turn."