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

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."

fwiw, the Times has done multiple stories on Beyoncé's tour, including things in the style, food and business sections, in addition to music, and podcasts.

xps that "something else" could maybe also that the Renaissance Tour is unabashedly, aggressively, unapologetically very, very gay

Which, tbh, also bears out in how much fewer units Renaissance moved than any of her other solo albums (yes, I know, "buying albums" doesn't happen anymore)

our favorite poor man south of richmond is spending another week at #1

finally a true song of the summer

Great post by J0rdan, but I think Renaissance had two more singles after "Break My Soul" ("Cuff It" and "America Has a Problem")?

oh yeah i forgot about "cuff it" but that sorta happened outside beyonce's control. and even then i'd point out that like, her response to the "cuff it" tik tok madness was not to do a remix w/ sza or lizzo or whatever but instead to do a slowed down R&B version based off a largely forgotten twista track. compare to taylor swift putting ice spice on the remix of "karma" and rolling it out like a summit meeting between two great nations. i just think taylor still consciously feeds the beast that is mainstream cultural omnipresence in a way that beyoncé doesn't

Yeah for sure

circling back to the rap/country/black/white representation on the hot 100 topic that triggered this revive ... i think it's hard to draw any real conclusions based on 3-9 months of hot 100 data. i think to some degree we've hit a cultural moment where rap has a pretty concrete set of stars who have been around for a while and very likely reached the peak of their cultural & commercial power -- future, lil baby, lil durk, travis scott, young thug etc. you could even rope post malone & the weeknd in there as major A list stars who are in/adjacent to rap culture and who appear to be on noticeable commercial downturns after years of invincibility. you have the ice spices, sexyy reds, destroy lonelys of the world who are new superstars & likely future commercial powerhouses but who are still at the very beginning of their careers. it also has to be mentioned that an entire generation of rap superstars from juice wrld to xxxtentaction to pop smoke to kay flock were all dead or in jail before the age of 22, and whatever commercial juice existed in their leftover catalogs has now been fully squeezed out.

comparatively i think country is just in a phase of the cycle w/ its current crop of stars where artists like morgan wallen, zach bryan, luke combs etc are in that sweeter spot of being established A listers who also still feel fresh & new -- being fans of those artists has, at the moment, the ever-shifting zeitgeist element, the feeling that you're apart of something culturally progressive that transcends the self. and that feeling is running off onto both newly minted stars -- bailey zimmerman, warren zieders -- and recent forefathers of less commercialized country such as chris stapleton. to make a generalization, i saw zach bryan in NYC this summer and it was a young, fratty type crowd -- if i had to guess these are kids whose older brothers were prob huge fans of future & young thug, along w/ the florida georgia lines and mainstream bro country of the time. do zach bryan fans just like rap less? maybe. obviously it's impossible to say. but if you talk to white country fans of that age, they look at all that bro country stuff -- sam hunt etc -- as corny shit that people older than them listen to. i do think that we might just currently be in a tiny sliver of the cultural timeline where, if you're a 15-22 year old white male, mainstream rap stars feel like your older brother's music whereas what's happening in country right now feels like "yours." if this is the case, things can/will shift in 2-3 years as a newer class of rap stars (the sort that i mentioned above) cement themselves culturally.

i think w/in the music industry people are looking at all of this less thru the lens of black/white and more thru the lens of mainstream/not, american/non-american. rap may be doing relatively poorly on the hot 100 right now but white mainstream pop isn't looking much better. taylor swift, dua lipa, billie eilish, miley cyrus etc can get their hits off but artists like sabrina carpenter and charlie puth -- young famous white artists w/ label machines behind them who are making quite good mainstream pop -- are having a hard time gaining any real footholds on the charts. let's say you had to put a mainstream pop artist on your artist's new single, but the true A listers were not an option -- who would you choose? i promise you its' harder than you think. fifty fifty just put carpenter on the remix of "cupid," which is one of the biggest new pop songs of the year. it's slim pickings out there. i would say the biggest new pop successes of this year are fifty fifty and newjeans -- not as relevant to our black/white dichotomy but very relevant if you're looking at the charts thru the lens of genre or nationality. K pop is absolutely taking up parts of the pie chart that used to belong to white american pop musicians and may not be giving it back. the biggest white pop breakouts of the year are guys like noah kahan and david kushner who are more serving the rock & AC spaces than they are true blue mainstream pop. the mid to up tempo synth based mainstream white american pop song -- the shadow of madonna that we have all lived in for 40 years -- is in a very endangered place, at the moment, if your name isn't taylor, miley, dua, billie etc

there is also the fact that a huge piece of this puzzle is the economics of purchasing a song from itunes vs listening to it on streaming & how billboard chooses to count a download versus a stream. conservatives absolutely discovered this summer that you can make a dent on the pop charts by purchasing songs when your "opponents," as it were, are largely streaming them. jason aldean went to number 1 w/ something like 230k single sales in one week -- that is a healthy number at any time, but it's way outsized in the current market. in 09 when 50 cent/dre/eminem went straight to number 1 w/ "crack a bottle" it set the one week itunes sales record w/ 420k downloads. so you can make the same impact now w/ half the sales. k pop fans have obviously been exploiting this market for years, as have nicki minaj fans who consistently send her new songs/remixes up the charts only for them to crash back down to earth a week or two later. if you take the view that black people at large have less purchasing power than white people and thus streaming had an equalizing effect post-itunes era by shifting the marketplace from multiple purchases to one monthly purchase (that granted access to an immense amount of data on listening habits), then i think it would be fair to say that a faction of white people realized they can tilt the playing field back the other way by once again making the rules of the game about individual purchases instead of the one time catch all (not in the least because you can generate a "controversy" via your sales and then also catch all the attendant streaming interest as well). there isn't a single mainstream black rapper in the top 80 of the digital sales chart as of this writing, but if you look at the apple music or spotify charts you will obviously not see that. you *will* see a lot more country, latin & k pop artists on those streaming charts than you typically did -- and thus less rap music, it is true -- but i do think people need to understand that a lot of what's happening w/ the hot 100 comes down to itunes sales vs streaming, and that says way more about the chart math employed by billboard than it does about people's listening habits or feelings towards entire genres of music.

it's obvious that a certain percentage of people buying up jason aldean and oliver anthony songs on itunes aren't actually fans of music per se -- instead they are either making pure political statements w/ their money (and here we connect to the bud light protests etc) or are just simply riding a fad in a less politically fraught sense ("lemme check out this new non-mainstream music everyone is talking about. i hate mainstream pop!"). so i think what we're seeing here is temporary -- either bcuz the conservative world will move on from sticking it to the libs by buying country music on itunes, or bcuz billboard will adjust its formulas so that itunes sales have less weight than they do now and the charts feel more reflective of what's actually happening out in the real world. billboard is frequently making tweaks to its chart formulas to reduce the purchasing power of small groups of people (i.e. announcing this summer that they were going to stop counting digital downloads made direct to consumer via in artist's website)

i think that the movement behind ppl like wallen, bryan, zimmerman etc is far more real, but also so much of why those artists are rising is because of rap, even as rap itself is impacted from a chart perspective. w/ wallen, you have a guy making direct musical overtures to rap music & doing some chart gaming by releasing 30+ song albums aka the rap streaming playbook. w/ zach bryan there is no musical connection, but you're nonetheless talking about an artist who blew up by releasing albums direct to soundcloud and then poured gas on the fire by feeding his fanbase an unending stream of new music. he is as much a mixtape rapper as he is a mainstream country musician. and what you're seeing w/ artists like zimmerman & warren zeiders & dozens of others kids nobody on this board knows is a lowering of the bar for the creation of what is now called country music. rappers have always just needed a beat to make rap music -- kids now don't even need to know producers, they can just rip free beats off youtube. there is no barrier to entry to become a rapper, artistically speaking. the same is now true for aspiring country singers -- you no longer need to move to nashville and get signed by a label and get a band together to record your songs and then have them pushed thru the radio to find an audience. all you need an acoustic guitar & a tik tok account. so part of what's happening is that the market is being flooded by new country artists in a way that wasn't previously possible when nashville as an industry had a complete stranglehold on the genre. perhaps the result of that is that the market share for country increases at the expense of rap music, but unless you work in the music industry i don't think that's really something to worry about. i think it means there will be more good country music being made than before but i don't think it means there will be less good rap music being made. there might be a direct relationship between how much country can be on a 100 song chart vs how much rap, but there is no such inverse relationship when you're talking about the creation & quality of music on the ground level.

ultimately i don't think rap music's status as the dominant musical cultural force in america is in peril. i mean, all this regional mexican rap that is blowing up is rap music. i think the winds of technology have been blowing in a way that has allowed other genres (and races, if we wanna put it in those terms) to catch up to the playbook rappers have been using for years. and i think rap has also stagnated a bit culturally as i outlined at the top. but i do think that rap music has always been a source of cultural & business innovation & that we'll be sitting here in a few years w/ a new crop of culturally dominant rappers aided by changes in technology (or innovations in how we use our current technology) looking back on the summer of 2023 as more of a blip in a hyper-specific period of time than the harbinger of a grand shift in the tectonic plates that undergird popular music

Great post, Jordan.

On the other hand, there's a new Ed Sheeran album coming out soon, so I expect that to rule the charts for awhile.

I was explaining to a friend last week that Zach Bryan released what are in essence two Drake-length mixtapes.

and great post, sarge

On the other hand, there's a new Ed Sheeran album coming out soon, so I expect that to rule the charts for awhile.

― hardcore technician gimmicks are also another popular choice f (President Keyes), Monday, August 28, 2023 4:32 PM (two minutes ago)

his album from earlier this year was a pretty big flop, this is basically his "i need to rescue my career right this instant or it's gone at this level" album. the last one had luke combs as the big "juice my streams" deluxe edition guest star reveal & it didn't even really work. which felt like the sign of something in a number of ways. i should've have mentioned him

which of these seems different than the others

This week's most-streamed songs:

1. @AintGottaDollar Rich Men North of Richmond
2. @MorganWallen Last Night
3. @DojaCat Paint The Town Red
4. @1GunnaGunna Fukumean
5. @lukecombs Fast Car

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) August 28, 2023

This week's most-heard songs on the radio:

1. @heisrema & @selenagomez Calm Down
2. @lukecombs Fast Car
3. @taylorswift13 Cruel Summer
4. @sza Snooze
5. @DUALIPA Dance The Night

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) August 28, 2023

This week's top-selling songs:

1. @AintGottaDollar Rich Men North of Richmond
2. @AintGottaDollar I Want To Go Home
3. @AintGottaDollar Aint Gotta Dollar
4. @Jason_Aldean Try That In A Small Town
5. #PaulRussell Lil Boo Thang

— billboard charts (@billboardcharts) August 28, 2023

ultimately i don't think rap music's status as the dominant musical cultural force in america is in peril

the freakout surrounding “rap’s cold streak” on the hot 100 always conveniently ignores “kill bill (remix)” (starts with a full 16 bars from doja) and latto’s duet with the bts guy

The Doja Cat version is not the one I hear on the radio.

yeah but the doja remix is what put the song over the top on the hot 100

the freakout surrounding “rap’s cold streak” on the hot 100

it also puts far more importance in the hot 100 than is warranted at a time when it means less than ever. there's this weird feedback loop happening where the hot 100 reflects less monoculture than it ever has -- and so understanding the charts requires more cultural literacy than perhaps it did before -- and yet its being used by people who aren't doing that kinda contextualization work to make grand monocultural statements about music

and by nicki minaj stans who believe that her “super freaky girl” being the last pure rap song to top the hot 100 is yet more proof of her perfection

Extremely anecdotally (on the Taylor/Beyoncé thing) – when Swift was coming to town (and then actually here), my work Slack was full of ppl trying to get tickets... now that the Beyoncé shows are coming up, there are many folks selling/trying to unload Beyoncé tix (including on behalf of others). Kind of strange, not sure what's behind that... there was plenty of Beyoncé buzz when her album came out (and I never saw anyone mention Midnights).

that lines up w/ my experience too ... at the beginning of the renaissance tour there were those articles about people flying to sweden bcuz it was cheaper/easier to buy airfare + that ticket than to get into one of the USA shows. meanwhile fast forward to now and i have multiple friends flying to new orleans because resale tickets for those shows were sub-$200 (upper deck but still). i just talked to a friend yesterday who decided on a whim to fly to LA for the shows this weekend bcuz the tickets had dropped like crazy on the secondary market. so it does seem like something is happening there but i also don't really know why. there were those early reports about how she wasn't moving/dancing as well as she typically does but i've heard glowing reviews from everyone who has seen the show. then again they all paid like $600 to get in so maybe not unbiased sources, but i don't detect any backlash to the shows so it's not clear to me why the enthusiasm seems to be waning

in my mind taylor hadn't toured in years whereas beyoncé has been out on the road a lot. but i looked up their touring schedules from 2015 on and that's not really the case, they've done the same number of tours. but the demand feels very different. the only thing i can think of is that a. swift has released a lot more music in between her tours than beyoncé has b. perhaps the marketing/structuring of the show as comprising all of her "eras" is really genius marketing, ppl feel like they're seeing a career spanning megashow as opposed to simple a tour attached to a new album

does it feel like the Beyonce resales are markedly more than any other non-Taylor Swift show? i guess that'd be the question. not that a Beyonce show isn't an "event", but these Taylor shows are essentially the most "can't miss" type gig to roll through, at least at this particular scale. it doesn't feel like the type of thing people are going to start to say "eh i don't really feel like going..." as it approaches.

A couple things with Swift too was it seems like she was <this> close to announcing a Summer tour for 2020 when Covid happened, so there was pent-up demand from that, and it seems like she picked up a lot of new fans during the quarantine times. Like I know a number of people who were casual fans before then who are diehard Swifties now (dropping $$$ on tix, vinyl even though they don't own turntables etc.)

xp I'm seeing resales for as low as $300 (that one's in Vegas, though); Row 2 of some "VIP" section for $750; Row 7 on on the field "Open to Best Offer (original price w/ fees is $1500 per tix)"... etc. Definitely on the higher side as concerts go, but not the crazy prices that Taylor tix were being offered at.

XPS I suspect the Beyonce resale market suffered from over-speculation from resellers hoping Eras lightning would strike twice.

(OTOH, a coworker told me about a friend who has literally gone bankrupt from seeing 7 or 8 dates on the Beyoncé tour, in locations ranging from New Jersey to Paris. The friend has a ticket for another, and my coworker says he's trying to convince him to sell it, so he can pay his rent...)

Beyonce is definitely not catering to the casual audience with her setlists, where Swift's tour seems like it's kind of the perfect greatest hits type tour for everyone?

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/beyonce/2023/allegiant-stadium-las-vegas-nv-33a50c75.html

no single ladies, halo, irreplaceable, baby boy etc....seems like she's trying a real specific vibe with this tour

xxp
this whole convo reminds me of the old joke about a guy saying he thought he really wanted to be a boxer until he fought someone who REALLY wanted to be a boxer. I mean I thought I loved music until I got to ilm and heard anecdotes like flying across a country or even to another country just to see a gig, let alone falling into bankruptcy. insanity.

https://x.com/nytimesarts/status/1696611433641877507?s=46&t=u2ZSlsY3trRV36IPP6jNDQ

On this week’s Popcast, conversations about the consonances between Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, the way Swift does (and does not) deploy dance and the thrills of seeing her perform for the first time.

could part of it be very simply generational. That median beyonce fans are slightly older

bump

The Billboard charts are broken, they’ve been hijacked by a media conglomerate