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

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

Once the dust settles on this whole dubstep Harlem Shake meme, more people will have learned about the actual Harlem Shake. Will the original dance make some kind of comeback? Will youtube uploaders start refining their Harlem Shake dance styles? Will G Dep see a significant boost in sales? Just some things I'm thinking about. I didn't even learn about this meme until yesterday.

the whole "how dare they use the name of a dance to describe an editing gag" thing is weird

i mean it's totally ok to find some viral nonsense stupid but the self-righteousness is ott

Well, I mean, hip-hop has appropriated and recontextualized things from other genres and mediums on occasion, yes.

the cheap stunts begin

the stunt has everything to do w/ the fact that they make money from those youtube views (+ it's free publicity) and 0% to do w/ billboard

are they only counting views of the official Youtube or do they include all the fan videos and "with lyrics" ones? I ask because I tried to click on some of these "Harlem Shuffle" Youtubes to see what this is all about and a lot of them have been removed.

not to be all fact-check police but the Carly Rae Jepsen thing is almost certainly unrelated to this, considering it happened in 2012: http://www.carlyraemusic.com/2012/10/make-your-own-lyric-video-and-win-a-skype-call-and-signed-goodies/

(different song, of course, but same idea.)

I assume they count any videos where an artist/song has been recognized by YouTube.

yeah that seems to be the gist, any recognition is registered and paid for. i'm just curious if there is or ever will be a statute of limitation.

the whole 'lyric video' thing seriously is out of control though. Justin Timberlake is on-camera, occasionally mouthing words of the song, in the "Suit & Tie" lyric video, but because the words are on the screen and it's not a super high budget production that's just the lyric video, and the 'real' video was something else.

A board member of yore weighs in

http://t.co/YYHOtAKK86

pretty sure this lyric video was made by a 12-year old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6S-0SbIVgs

that's my niece you're talking about!

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.

― D4y0 (some dude), Friday, February 22, 2013 6:03 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is not actually true from what I understand

ha well you def know more about YouTube than me, i thought all view-based traffic was measured by the "open the page and you're counted" rule. what is your understanding?

Looks like some dude is right?
http://www.quora.com/YouTube/How-far-into-the-video-does-a-user-need-to-watch-for-YouTube-to-count-it-as-a-view
http://www.atlantaanalytics.com/practicing-web-analytics/how-does-youtube-video-view-count-work/

Anyway, I wonder how many songs this year are going to come with dance moves attached.

you say that like half the songs out there don't have dance moves attached to them already

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

being forced to listen to a song over and over again on the radio doesn't equate to actually liking it either! also looool that you want to limit it to people listening to the "actual full song."

Maybe they'll somehow work YouTube Likes and Dislikes into the system.

this harlem shake song. does it really only last 30 seconds? (i only heard about it yesterday sorry if im asking a dumb question)

someone 'liking something' and something being popular aren't the same things regardless

ie like the billboard chart never strictly reflected 'the most liked' music

anyway related to this: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/21/172644482/tv-ratings-agency-nielsen-will-begin-measuring-online-streaming

this harlem shake song. does it really only last 30 seconds?

it's normal length (4 mins or something) but some of the meme videos that are being monetized / counting toward it's #1 chart position are that short

it's 3:18