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

lol i love the description on the strik 9ine youtube vid

I've never heard or heard of this Strik 9ine song!

I wonder if they had done this chart pre-Mack would they really have given "tootsee roll" Top Rap Song Ever status or changed the methodology to be less about weeks on chart.

http://www.soultracks.com/cr-whitewash

good piece, and yeah billboard methodology has issues and o no the internet etc but 90% of this problem (at a minimum) is due to radio, more specifically homogenization of pop radio and shift toward edm and post-edm. there's also an extent to which the trend is shaping (warping) r&b radio.

yeah, great piece

so with "all of me" looking like a legitimate contender for #1 in the coming weeks (to follow "happy" which is still going strong, tho declining), it would seem that the safest way to score a crossover smash these days if you are a black (male) artist is to release something that adult contemporary radio could get on board with

the middle of the road in 2014 is the worst middle of the road

I don't think it's that simple, dyl, both those songs are kind of unique cases. I do think it's notable, though, that black artists only have to skew mild and adult contempo if they're not already pop radio mainstays, Jason Derulo can be as clubby and risque as he wants.

the safest way to score a crossover smash these days if you are a black (male) artist is to release something that adult contemporary radio could get on board with - same as it ever was

there's a reason the first singles from thriller and bad were what they were

I was rather astonished by two things I noticed in Rihanna's discography:
1.) Rihanna has had a release every year since 2005 (in 2008, she released Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, which itself had new singles)
2.) Rihanna's relevancy has -increased- since her debut.

She has evolved from a one hit-wonder to a rising star to proving she could maintain her shine to now kicking back as she joins the ranks of Madonna and Michael Jackson as a pop legend. For when you listen to Rihanna (and great pop music), you are listening to her persona. This is the appeal. The songwriting takes a backdrop to the personality, just as it did for Madonna and Michael Jackson. Just as these legends reflected the times, Rihanna does for ours.

Who is Rihanna?

What is considered the zeigeist of the current digital age?

Multicultural, multiracial, multilingual, un-aware vagueness.

Her lyrics seemingly draw material from several lifetimes (think to how many different songwriters have had their stories told through Rihanna's persona); these lyrics reflect upon multiple relationships which are evaluated in a sublime light. We don't know her, just like we don't really know Robert De Niro or Marilyn Monroe. Like an actress, Rihanna evokes powerful emotions requiring substance beyond typical human-capacity. How does she respond to this demand for infinite substance?

She stays silent. Sure, the minute she talks, the appeal is gone; but if she finds a way to leave the public wanting more (through mystery), she becomes the center of the conversation. It's simple logic -- you create the illusion that there's something -more- and it results in hype about what that something is. Rihanna is the latest to come along with her spin on this; except, as a direct product of a music system which has been at practice for over half a century, she is heavily-coached by people who have "Hype 101" mapped out in precise formula.

Rihanna is the end of pop music from the major label industry. At this point, all known major sounds have been recycled time-after-time; Rihanna is the dying roar of a Tyrannosaurus Rex -- powerful, but powerless against an asteroid. The industry's long-adapted to the pitfalls which came from presenting a flawed human upon a pedestal, claiming them to be flawless, and Rihanna is their magnum opus. In this metaphor, the internet is the asteroid and the prehistoric recording industry stands no chance -- regardless how many teeth.

Anyone who doesn't believe this need simply look at how many #1 singles Rihanna has had in such a short-period of time. It might be said that the industry has just been one gigantic attempt to artificially recreate Beatlemania, but without all that lyrical "rebellion" and musical "abstraction". Keeping the hype and removing any trace of challenge, Rihanna's music captures a sublime in-between space that has millions fascinated.

So in the age when everyone has their OWN pedestal, it is almost impossible to not be somewhat vein. Furthermore, when you look around and see that everyone else ALSO has their own pedestal, this vanity becomes even easier to believe in. So if everyone's already high off their own self-made hype, how does a industry of veteran hype-makers respond?

They give it their all, building a pedestal so high we're too busy admiring its scale to notice Robyn Rihanna Fenty didn't actually build this thing -- "Rihanna" did. It is coming from an unnaturally perfect plane of perspective, high in the clouds. She's standing miles above us and from way down here, none of us can make out who it is EXACTLY at the top of that pedestal, but plastered on the front is a massive projection of her fabled image.

This is what it is like listening to Rihanna. You can critique it by calling out the manufactured origin of the project, but if you suspend your disbelief and look at the project in another manner -- her success is a collective effort. Yes, her branding is calculated more meticulously than tomorrow's stock market and yes, this creates a "robotic"-like atmosphere, but her success requires the suspension of disbelief. This wondrous pedestal of stone which Rihanna sings upon is not really stone at all -- instead a bizarre, transparent hologram. When we forget this fact and let ourselves go, what's left isn't a hologram at all, but something very tangible and personal. -Personal- because we are humans and this is a perfect human image magnified to the level of a God from myth -- it reminds us of our inner-beauty, our inner-perfections and our higher potential.

Shine bright like a diamond!

xp that's very interesting some dude, i had never considered that re: derulo. but yes i think you are right that i am probably trying to make things simpler than they are

lmaooo i c/p'd part of that to see where it came from and OF COURSE it's rateyourmusic

It isn't Lefsetz?

i've been waiting for an opportunity to defend diamonds for a long time and i finally had my chance

let's 51 this motherfucker, people

stfu sleeve

I'm gonna end every post now with "Shine bright like a diamond!"

Shine bright like a diamond!

I'm still waiting for her to release a collaboration with Electric Six who have also consistently released an album each year since 2005, though 2012's was a live album.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/business/media/tweets-about-music-to-get-a-billboard-chart.html?hpw&rref=technology

oh man

MJ and Madonna had career-defining images but I don't agree about the songwriting taking a back seat, I'd say at the height of their powers the songs and the image were in perfect harmony w each other in their own idiosyncratic ways this is why they are legends.

is it april 1st already?

No, that's Tuesday of next week

Shine bright like a diamond!

"http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/business/media/tweets-about-music-to-get-a-billboard-chart.html?hpw&rref=technology";

This already exists -- it's existed for at least 1 year

http://www.billboard.com/charts/social-50

social 50 is for ranking artists' social media presence while this new thing appears to be about tracking how much online chatter songs, not artists, are generating. plus this will be updated real-time as opposed to the social 50 which is updated weekly.

hmmm, well, I dunno. When Twitter tried to do that, what ended up happening was it looked just like that Social 50 chart. The reason being there are more people talking about Top 40 than say, DJ Rashad.

They should just collaborate with the NSA and get a definitive list of what everyone listens to on their phone. Give it a nice patriotic name like "The Freedom 50".

Total Entertainment Awareness

and this man to run it:

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=99442#unread

Chris Molanphy goes IN. Major, must read piece.

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/9378-i-know-you-got-soul-the-trouble-with-billboards-rbhip-hop-chart/

Chris on FB about it:

"Papa's Got a Brand-New Bag." "Rescue Me." "Mr. Big Stuff." "I'm Every Woman." "Sexual Healing." "I Feel for You." "I Need Love." "Me, Myself & I." "All Around the World." "Real Love." "On & On." "Work It." "What You Know." "A Milli." Classic songs—and all of them only went to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart—a list that was once truly distinct from the Hot 100 pop chart and was the authoritative ranking of the music of black America.
This piece—on the long, tangled history of that chart—is my first major feature for Pitchfork since last fall's Modern Rock/Alternative megafeature and, incidentally, is the longest article I've ever written. I needed the space to explain how the chart developed, how this chart was saved from irrelevance in 1965 and became the authority in black music for decades, and how the era of digital music has made it a challenge to track what true fans of R&B and hip-hop are consuming, week in, week out.
The piece is also—a year and a half after Billboard changed the way the chart is formulated—a polemic, from a diehard chart fan who feels the R&B/Hip-Hop chart needs to be fixed. A purported R&B/Hip-Hop chart topped by white people 44 out 52 weeks last year has issues—and even now, when topped by Pharrell, the chart is nothing more than the Hot 100's truncated stepchild

It's a really outstanding if depressing summary.

The worst counter-argument I've heard – I've heard it on campus whenever I bring it up to students at the radio station - is that it's a good thing "boundaries are falling." It's a weaker iteration of the reverse racism line.

On one hand we're asking billboard to provide information the labels clearly have little interest in, or else they would. On the other, as long as they do have these worthless, editorial-based sub-hot 100 charts, they acting under the vanity that they ARE providing that information.

it's not really that Billboard is hiding any info they used to publish, they've just pushed it off to the "R&B/Hip-Hop (or insert whatever genre here) Airplay" charts while altering the nature of the main genre charts people generally look at. i've pretty much only regularly looked up the airplay-only charts for the last year because i still have that option and i learn something about what hit songs are trending beyond 'yes people are still buying that one Eminem song.'

Yeah I don't think anyone said they're hiding anything

I'm referring to the info Chris suggests would be worthwhile at the end of his piece re demographics and the net, not airplay data

ah ok misread your post

The tragedy is an industry's acceptance of itself as a mere subset of an ad-driven Internet economy. Psy at #1 of the rap chart is mostly just a farcical aftermath.

obviously a fantastic piece but the idea that there is no "black youtube" is insane in a world where someone as entrenched in major label pop as nicki minaj is dropping a video exclusively to world star

that said there have been enough rumors about worldstar view counts being fishy and/or purchasable that i'm not sure billboard could reliably count them. but it's a really weird thing to ignore if you're in the business of attempting to accurately tabulate the music that americans consume online.

Well the exact line from Chris is:

Sites like WorldStarHiphop let you stream both mainstream and underground videos, but they don’t sell enough stuff to be helpful to Billboard.

So, you got me?

well youtube doesn't sell anything either so i'm not sure what that means

What does he mean by sell in a world where a singer debuts in the top 10 one week and is out of the hot 100 the next, based on practically no sales but from scoring a viral ad? Unless its the conceit that the song must be purchasable, even if sales are infinitesimal compared to streams (and not even streams of the song per se).

Referring to Soko, in case you haven't heard.

So like, people click on a commercially unavailable freestyle for the freestyle and that doesn't count, but people click on an ad that just happens to be scored by some nonsense and congrats on your top ten single!

even if he means that worldstar's streams are dwarfed by youtube, i would argue that he's wrong.

nicki's "lookin ass" video debuted on worldstar and currently has 15m+ views http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/video.php?v=wshhCBBlBm0S8jCdjaY9

considering the overall point of his piece that seems like a weird thing to just sweep aside w/ a parenthetical

that's double the amount of views it has on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mwNbTL3pOs

amazing article. learned a lot from it about things that i sorta knew but didn't really understand re: how changes in the industry in the 80s and 90s affected the charts.