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

http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/article/gangnam-style-generated-8-million-in-youtube-ad-revenues/

It was estimated last month that the six month old novelty track and internet phenomenon had generated about that much in total, including download revenues and sync deals in addition to YouTube revenues. The Google figures would suggest Psy’s big hit may have been even more profitable to date, though it’s not clear how much of that $8 million in ad income went to the artist and his business partners.

With ‘Gangnam Style’ having been viewed 1.23 billion times to date, that stat suggests the video was earning about $6.50 for every 1000 streams, which would suggest ads around the promo were being sold at a premium, which figures given just how big a hit the cheesy-k-pop+silly-dance phenomenon became last year.

so roughly $1m probably at this point

will never look at william bloody swygart's name the same way again xp

hopefully there will be another rebecca black event to showcase how absurd billboard is now

I think gangnam style being kept out of the #1 spot already proved how absurd billboard is. unless you think that a maroon 5 song with a tenth of the youtube views of GS is really more popular just because clear channel plays it more.

can we leverage the internet to get old memes like "Chocolate Rain" onto the Billboard charts?

"Nyan Cat" was robbed.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr01/2013/2/19/16/anigif_enhanced-buzz-22020-1361308248-10.gif

hate u

http://i.imgur.com/SMYgWps.gif

u are not tricking me again

I vented a bit.

re: the static nature of the Spotify charts, I notice that AWOLNATION's "Sail" is still at #15 as of today

who's crying the most right now...psy, rick astley, antoine dodson or rebecca black

and does this mean fewer "this video has been deleted per sony/bmg/random label" occurrences? does having random lyric videos and fanvids of watson/sherlock set to an adele now mean enough eyes and ears and billboard impact that it changes how they manage the dissemination of their ip on youtube and in general?

i'm not a fan of this but i suppose it seems like logical progression. i'm old school and think of billboard charting as more of a "statement" vs an actual snapshot of what's going into people's ears, incidental or not. so what gives me pause is that it takes a lot of the agency and intention out of what drives the chart...when you buy/stream a song or a radio station chooses to play it it's about the specific song; a song charting because it was the bg music in a video of skateboarding injuries that was posted on reddit is giving it credit for a secondary and not indispensable role.

there was 'agency and intention' driving the chart?

more so than a song is getting a bump on the chart because it's part of a viral video that people are clicking on w/ zero aforethought to what song was included. traditionally someone was making a decision based on the song, someone was buying it or streaming it, a radio station chose to play it (involved in some cycle based on listener preferences), so the previous iteration of the chart was based more on active listening preferences than passive.

but sales still factor in, and harlem shake is selling. there's a lot more intention involved in somebody deciding to put that song in their video, a friend deciding to forward it to you because you might like it, you deciding to click on it, etc. than in a song getting added to a corporate radio playlist.

Sales factor in, but Billboard says that "Harlem Shake" is at 3.5 times the chart points of the current #2 hit (Thrift Shop), which has more sales than "Harlem Shake". I'm 99% sure that even if "Harlem Shake" had no sales at all it would still be #1 by a comfortable margin. That's my main problem, that the YouTube views seem to be weighted too high.

it's really dumb to equate youtube views with an itunes sales, it's a whole different level of engagement with a listener, an itunes sale is saying "i like this song and i want to listen to it repeatedly", youtube can be anything "i like this song" to "what the fuck is this?" "this is so stupid" "eh this is kinda funny" etc etc

you're talking about intention re: the video aspect, i'm talking about intention re: the song. you're clicking on "guy gets hit in the groin" because you want to see a guy get kicked in the crotch, the fact that "hurts so good" is playing in the bg is neither here nor there to the viewers. songs get added to radio playlists because stations and listeners have a symbiotic relationship so they supposedly drive each other's decisions.

i'm not a pollyanna, i don't harbor any misconceptions about charts perfectly and fairly capturing the zeitgeist. but doesn't mean that this isn't a step down.

on the other hand, 2 Girls 1 Cup would have made a pretty awesome #1

omg

look at the upside, maybe lemme smang it will get the respect it deserves

i don't see the problem, a priori, with rebecca black or somebody like it being #1 on a chart

there's no competiting chart because what billboard used to do isn't practical anymore. I think 'people who give a shit about this stuff' are limited to this thread.

I don't think either of these claims are true! the thing is, Billboard's nationwide charts generally shitty for a number of reasons, one of which is the dreaded homogeneity - as late as the late eighties, regional charts are a thing, I know some old-school industry dudes who collect and publish them and they're fascinating and cool. And extinct, because Clear Channel etc., but we're in a moment where something like them - except not regionally, but in terms of "people who're into _____" - could be gathered and reported and used. I do get that artists can use their Billboard performance to get better advances, guarantees, etc., but...it's really weird that this antiquated dinosaur model of popularity measurement is afforded any "preserve this model" sentiment imo

i buy all the arguments that a set of music charts ought to represent music as it is being produced and consumed by its various communities, instead of... whatever billboard is ostensibly trying to show

i wonder if the way around all this is, instead of trying to weigh and then compile diffs between purchases, airplay, tube plays, etc, and running them together by ill-defined genre, just have charts for the various channels. physical sale, (paid?) download, radio, internet video/stream.

you're clicking on "guy gets hit in the groin" because you want to see a guy get kicked in the crotch, the fact that "hurts so good" is playing in the bg is neither here nor there to the viewers.

but that song wouldn't end up on the charts. if lots of people were making similar videos using the same song and the track started to sell because of it, then the song is obviously a big part of the viral success and does deserve to be counted in the charts.

xxp I'm fine with them including youtube numbers (although I think they're going about it all wrong), but like I said I'm a lot more interested in the cultural implications of all this than the numbers stuff.

just have charts for the various channels. physical sale, (paid?) download, radio, internet video/stream.

They have this.

ha i was about to addend that i barely know what billboard offers now

i buy all the arguments that a set of music charts ought to represent music as it is being produced and consumed by its various communities, instead of... whatever billboard is ostensibly trying to show

the problem is there's not some objective way to go about this. these charts have always involved an arbitrary weighing of metrics and we're currently in an era where the way that music is being produced and consumed changes and continues to change every year.

oops meant to italicize

a good comparison point might be the us news college ranking. it weighs a dozen streams of 'hard data' in an ultimately arbitrary way and spits out a list that is very important to some people and mostly not important to the rest of the world. but 'what is a good college' is like 'what is a popular song' - there are various hard numbers you can wave around but it's ultimately a question that can't be answered and will be even harder to answer in 20 years.

i buy all the arguments that a set of music charts ought to represent music as it is being produced and consumed by its various communities, instead of... whatever billboard is ostensibly trying to show

i wonder if the way around all this is, instead of trying to weigh and then compile diffs between purchases, airplay, tube plays, etc, and running them together by ill-defined genre, just have charts for the various channels. physical sale, (paid?) download, radio, internet video/stream.

As a trade publication they're basically trying to gauge how much money a song is making right? And since significant revenue can now come from places like youtube it makes sense to include them. If anything, I think you could argue that radio is the least important factor.

and I would assume the main reason to include radio is so that retailers know which records to stock. since that's increasingly irrelevant, I don't see much of a reason to include airplay in charts at all anymore.

Part of it's just the cultural baggage from the days when charts were more directly pinned to what people were shelling out money on - the idea that "this is one of the top ten songs in the country!" was a shorthand for "this is actually really popular and is somehow indicative of mainstream taste in the country" or alternately "of what hip hop/rock/whatever fans are really excited about."

Radio has a tenuous relationship to that concept; obviously something can be a major zeitgeist piece of music and radio not really show that, but somehow it just feels right that the #1 song in the summer of whatever year should also be the song that, twenty years later when you think back on that year, that's the song that comes to mind, it was inescapable, every car that drove by you heard it coming out the windows! As opposed to some thing on Youtube that a much smaller segment of the population watched over and over again, with way more people never even knowing it exists. It's the lingering fantasy that we have some kind of, let's call it a "pop culture" that carries with it some kind of unifying Zeitgeisty significance over and apart from its actual roots in the kind of bean-counting money-making that is actually why records get made and why Billboard makes charts.

For another version of this that may complicate my take, see best song that reached #1 on airplay but was never allowed to chart on the billboard hot 100 1995-1998 - dunno if it seems wrong that "Fly" was not #1 but it sure seems weird.

the youtube zeitgeist is probably more inescapable than the 'every car that drove by you' zeitgeist

Disagree - it's still a lot easier to not see a viral video than to not hear a hit radio song, IMO. There are lots of viral songs that I could name just from seeing them discussed and links shared on Facebook, but never actually clicked on even once.

I think wk's point about billboard being a trade magazine and not, idk, a journal of cultural history is important. I mean ultimately billboard is just trying to keep itself relevant in a business that has changed substantially and will continue to change at a very rapid pace. it probably won't keep itself relevant, because something's 'billboard ranking' has already lost its luster as a universal metric and any new metrics it constructs will have to change so frequently that they won't hold any authority.

xp

Jody Rosen and Chris Molanphy weigh in

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/02/21/_harlem_shake_is_no_1_after_billboard_begins_counting_youtube_views_what.html

lol @ that article. I can't help but feel an intense schadenfreude at the total failure of popism here. "My populism only runs so deep." indeed.

re: the static nature of the Spotify charts, I notice that AWOLNATION's "Sail" is still at #15 as of today

― This beat is TWEENCHRONIC (DJP), Thursday, February 21, 2013 1:13 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that song has pretty much not left Spotify's top 30 for 2 years now, and recently jumped up the sales charts and reached its highest Hot 100 peak in the last few weeks (for what reason i'm not sure). it's pretty much oldest song on the Spotify charts, though, most everything else is from the past 6 months or so.

sorry if this has been mentioned already, but does billboard have a way of telling how many youtube streams are actually coming from within the united states?

Was just going to ask teledyldonix's question. Can I as an Australian influence the billboard charts? Does this mean that k and j pop will now be more generally present on the charts?

the cheap stunts begin

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/1681/popupgr.jpg

think the thing that annoys me most is the 30 sec thing? even if you ignore the fact that checking a song out on youtube doesn't equate to actually LIKING it, at least limit it to people consuming the actual full song

in a way i totally hope for another "friday", where most of its views were driven through DISLIKE, or morbid fascination with how "bad" it was

The 30 seconds thing is particularly troubling given the "coincidence" that it greatly benefits "Harlem Shake" the first week it was introduced.

to be clear, I have no idea if there IS a rule about minimum video length to impact chart position -- just asked Bill Werde on twitter, although he'll probably ignore me again.

watching 2 seconds of a 4-minute YouTube always counts towards its views and always has, though. Lex bringing that up raises a whole other issue about all this.

watching 2 seconds of a 4-minute YouTube always counts towards its views and always has, though

aaaaahahahahaha really??? so someone checking a youtube out of curiosity and then within the first 10 secs going "ugh no do not want" counts towards its measure of popularity????

i suppose in a clickbait age i shouldn't be surprised but omg everything is fucked

guys the charts weren't exactly an oasis of integrity where we fled from the harsh uncool realities of the world you know

this is kind of a 'the devil you know' thing though -- we're used to the inherent problems of the old Hot 100, but now there's a bunch of new ones to sort out and identify