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

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.

the problem is that Billboard relies on data reported by retailers and radio stations and they had an incentive to give up that data because they got something useful out of the charts. you could theoretically make some amazing new charts out of data collected from spotify, iTunes, and youtube, but what incentive do those companies have to give out that information? they don't have to make decisions about what records to stock or which songs to add to their playlists, so they might as well just keep the data to themselves and sell it to advertisers or whatever. basically the very idea of charts seems to be useless to the new digital music industry.

If there's any one image that best sums up the ridiculous consequences of Billboard's R&B/rap chart changes it's def this:

http://ll-media.tmz.com/2014/02/25/0225-billy-ray-cyrus-3.jpg

the problem is that Billboard relies on data reported by retailers and radio stations and they had an incentive to give up that data because they got something useful out of the charts. you could theoretically make some amazing new charts out of data collected from spotify, iTunes, and youtube, but what incentive do those companies have to give out that information? they don't have to make decisions about what records to stock or which songs to add to their playlists, so they might as well just keep the data to themselves and sell it to advertisers or whatever. basically the very idea of charts seems to be useless to the new digital music industry.

― wk, Monday, April 14, 2014 6:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude...ALL of those organizations give data to Billboard. and generally retailers and radio stations haven't really had to be incentivized to manually give Billboard data since the advent of SoundScan, BDS, etc. 20 years ago.

how much of that data do they really give? like are they providing billboard w/ nearly as detailed a demographic breakdown as they are their clients or are they just 'well here's what got played and how much'?

yeah, I doubt they give much more than what's already publicly visible. play counts basically.

I guess it depends on what billboard's main purpose is supposed to be. If the point is to collect data and sell it to the music industry, that doesn't work with the digital music industry who already has better data of their own (and obviously isn't concerned with where to allocate shelf space or airtime). But if billboard's main purpose now is entertainment journalism for the fans and critics to enjoy the inside baseball of the industry, then I don't see how these tech companies are going to give up the useful data that would give us interesting automatically generated charts like the top power electronics albums in the midwest or whatever.

And Mr. Molanphy discusses the issues in his article some more with SFJ

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/2014/05/fixing-the-billboard-music-charts.html

…as John Legend replaces Pharrell at the top of the Hot 100...

the problem is obviously about more than just what tops the chart... besides, the likely next #1 is iggy azalea

enjoyed the molanphy/sfj thing and chris as always has great insights. his idea of having R&B/hip hop 'super users' to be a nielsen family to provide digital sales/streaming data for certain charts is interesting although i kinda wonder if it's actually feasible. i really just feel like it wouldn't be that complicated to recalibrate the genre charts so airplay is weighted more, and kind of borderline acts like Macklemore only appear on the genre charts if they get enough R&B radio spins, like Lorde or Katy Perry's crossover songs did.

yeah, i've also been wondering how feasible figuring out who comprises the 'super users' group would be. if identifying them involves finding who mostly buys hip-hop and r&b, it means defining the group would involve coming up with some initial definition of what songs qualify, which billboard has already proven can be quite a messy business for them. maybe could just use id3 tags? in any case my gut is that it's a clever solution that would be harder to actually do than it appears.

your idea about just shifting the airplay-to-everything-else ratio and only allowing songs that achieve a certain amount of urban radio play is interesting too. that actually has a parallel in how billboard did their old 'pop 100' chart, which in retrospect seems like it only existed because certain people were getting uncomfortable with seeing so many hip-hop and r&b acts at the top of the charts all the time. basically they compiled the chart by weighting sales more heavily and by shrinking the radio panel to just top 40 stations, but even then lots of r&b and hip-hop songs were charting highly, so the june after they made the chart, they added an additional rule that songs weren't eligible until they were getting at least 100,000 audience impressions on chr OR they reached the top 10 on hot digital songs. (source: the last question on this ask billboard column, which is honestly a bit cringe-inducing in its use of phrases like 'true pop music' to describe madonna and girls aloud but NOT r&b).

in the end they discontinued that chart after it started becoming irrelevant b/c top-40-leaning, sales-driven hits on the hot 100 became the norm again, but it's pretty interesting that for so long they were actually basically bending over backwards to give 'whiter' music a better chance on their charts.

to be fair the "true pop music" stuff comes from the guy submitting the letter, at least on the record billboard doesn't touch that

'pure pop,' 'vocal pop,' there's a lot of different terms to differentiate things that are pop-as-genre and don't have strong ties to a more concrete genre like rock or R&B, none of them totally ideal.

the phrase "pure pop" always has racialized undertones to me

yep

that would be the not-ideal part yeah

Did Billboard ever have an airplay chart only for radio stations that bragged about not playing Rap?

"Soak Up The Sun" #1 for 400 weeks

Smash Hits used to advertise itself as 100% PURE POP (a 12 year old Billie Piper was the actress iirc) but clearly pure pop means something different over in the US. Or does NV think Smash Hits was racist?

yes

fair enough then

http://youtu.be/x_7tWa-QFpA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_7tWa-QFpA

Did Billboard ever have an airplay chart only for radio stations that bragged about not playing Rap?

this would be the adult contemporary format and related ones (hot adult contemporary, adult pop)... the ones whose program directors say things like "I think the Macklemore & Ryan Lewis version was very well done. However, for a radio station like ours that has the moniker, 'Today's best hits without the rap,' playing that song wasn't an option."

http://www.billboard.com/charts/adult-contemporary
http://www.billboard.com/charts/adult-pop-songs

yes

― Hastings Banter (Noodle Vague), Sunday, 11 May 2014 20:21 (1 hour ago)

pls elaborate ya unlovable old prick

sorry for thread derail guys

you may as well explain why you think Smash Hits was racist since you were asked so nicely.

the phrase "pure pop" always has racialized undertones to me

yep

the notion of "pure pop" is stacked with racial undertones, from its general use to refer to a deracinated genre cut adrift from black musical forms to the worst connotations of the word "pure". thinking about it is a nuanced task bound to draw objections from people who "don't see colour" and who think a lot of racial subtexts are imaginary, and i didn't want to intrude that complex debate into a thread covering somewhat different territory.

the connotations of a concept used by different people in different circumstances certainly aren't reducible to a question as daft as "was this old magazine racist y/n?" my initial response to the rev was just to agree that i shared his instincts, and i didn't want to spin this into a topic i thought was frivolous.

that's what i think, we could start a new thread if we need to discuss whether there are any racial subtexts in pop music reception/criticism. there might be the odd one that already exists.

you should start a new one then because if one exists good luck searching for it.
I still dont think Smash Hits meant it with any racialized undertones though but we can discuss that elsewhere if you start it, NV

whether one means to be racist (or sexist, or homophobic etc) is of literally zero relevance to whether one's words or actions ARE racist (or sexist, or homophobic etc)

"pure pop" (and "perfect pop") are racialised phrases to me in very obvious ways, though i wouldn't single out smash hits are a foremost perpetrator of them. neither would i single smash hits out as a particularly significant vehicle of racism, even coded or subconscious, but i'm pretty certain that if we were to re-read back issues from the 80s a host of phrases and assumptions would be racially dubious, just by dint of the fact that it was a publication with a majority white staff in a society where racism was (and still is) endemic. (this is also true for just about every publication you can think of btw.)

Iggy Azalea has the #1 hit now and as Whiney points out on twitter, the last 4 rap songs to go #1 are all by white people.

ohhhh lord 2pac big please talk to this sucker cause they killing hip hop they taking the pain and struggle of life of hip hop the only thing we coulda express our minds and pain. and these suckers took it and made it look like garbage thats why we get judge so much cause these shit dont be making sence

I guess that's not counting "Timber" but ok fair enough

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bn9Usy-CAAIOXLZ.jpg:large

a bigoted rapper, never thought i'd see the day

diversity hire
btw fuck the direction of all this

i mean fucking pat boone's gonna drop a single with dj mustard next week about his paramours at assisted living right? thats where this is going.

Tbf rap had a good thirty years plus before this moment how long did rock have

Fuck the direction of all this, yes. You can't make me dislike "Fancy," tho.

"Fancy" doesn't exist without the Charli hook though.