Posts Tagged ‘Billboard’

Shake It Up: Hot 100 Roundup—3/2/13

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

The big news this week, of course, is the addition of YouTube streams to the formula Billboard uses to create the Hot 100. The new system propels “Harlem Shake” to number one (the first time a previously unknown artist has debuted in the top spot), and causes a lot of movement in other areas of the chart as well. Rihanna’s “Stay”, for instance, thanks to an appearance on the Grammy awards and a video in which Rihanna is naked in a bath tub, leaps 60-some spots into the top ten, and songs like “Gangnam Style” get a a new lease on life just as they were about to drop off the chart.

Overall, I think it’s a good idea. YouTube is a far better gauge of popularity than radio, and though the system is ripe with opportunities for abuse, it’s no more ripe that the pre-Soundscan days. We can look forward to a few years of constant novelty hits until the culture adjusts (as it will), but that doesn’t seem too great a price to pay for more accuracy. Besides, some of those novelties will be great.

Baauer—“Harlem Shake”
#1

The most important thing to remember about “Harlem Shake”, the track, as opposed to the Harlem Shake phenomenon or the Harlem Shake controversy, is that it isn’t finished. This is a backing track, a beat designed for someone to rap over (Azealia Banks had her contribution rejected by Baauer, but the freestyle versions are starting to roll out). This is obvious from the huge open spaces in the record, and the way the track drops in volume in the places where the vocals would go. It’s not meant to be listened to on its own, and its sudden discovery and viral infestation of the culture has more to do with luck and the desire of people to be silly than anything else. Even considered only as a beat, though, it isn’t much, though it’s good enough that the right rapper could make something worthwhile out of it. Of course, it’s too late for that; we’re stuck with it the way it is.

Justin Timberlake—“Mirrors”
#24

“Suit & Tie” has its great moments, but it’s a mess. As a follow-up, “Mirrors” is less of a mess, but it doesn’t have any great moments. What it has, instead, are bits and pieces of 80s pop and soul loosely strung together and stretched out for over 8 minutes of head-scratching mediocrity. It’s meant to be a love song, but the lyrics, and the way Timberlake sings them, create an odd sense of distance from the subject. When Timberlake says he couldn’t have gotten “bigger” without her, what exactly is he referring to? His career? His soul? The length of this song? At the same time, while she’s reflecting him, and he’s reflecting her, they’re both being reflected by a third mirror, which Timberlake says he could watch all the time (I thought he was watching her). Who or what does this mirror represent? God? The press? Timberlake’s third eye? One final question: if your lover reflects you back so perfectly, are you actually seeing her at all?

One Direction—“One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks)”
#45

I’ve mentioned One Direction’s rock tendencies in the past, and on this charity single they live up to them more wonderfully than I would have dared hope. They smartly play both songs for maximum aural impact, i.e. fast, hard, and loud, and don’t make any attempts to modernize or decorate them. I’m sure it’s something they dashed off in a couple of hours, but that’s a large part of its charm. Also, though this wouldn’t be as big a deal in the U.K. or Ireland, where “Teenage Kicks” was a big hit, it’s nice to know that somebody still remembers the Undertones.

Ace Hood featuring Future & Rick Ross—“Bugatti”
#77

This is fairly ordinary, as might be expected, but I find myself fascinated by the title line, “I woke up in a new Bugatti”, if only because of the mystery it creates. Hood never explains where that Bugatti came from. Since he woke up in it, I assume it’s his, either through purchase or purloinment (most likely purchase, because who would bother to brag about stealing a car anymore?). The question is whether he even remembers how he got it. If he fell asleep in the car, that suggests he was pretty much wasted when he got in. Did he buy it when he was stoned or during a blackout? If so, has Hood achieved what might be considered a higher level of boasting? If he has so much money he can buy a car that costs over a million dollars when he’s wasted and not worry about it, his bragging rights would be somewhere in the astronomical range. $6,000 shoes are nothing compared to this.

P!nk featuring Nate Reuss—“Just Give Me A Reason”
#84

P!nk’s permanently exasperated view of herself and her relationships mesh perfectly with Nate Reuss’s feigned confidence tinged with desperation, making “Just Give Me A Reason” an effective and affecting duet even if the lyrics don’t always connect. Still not sure whether the situation is resolved or left hanging, though that may be the point. Realest moment: when Reuss sings “My dear [addressing her this way, of course, is a sure sign that he has no idea what she’s talking about], we still have everything, and it’s all in your mind”, and P!nk replies in an undertone, “Yeah, but this is happening”.

J. Cole featuring Miguel—“Power Trip”
#91

I’ve never heard anything from Cole that wasn’t mediocre, and here’s another one. Even Miguel’s presence doesn’t help, though it doesn’t hurt.

Joe Budden featuring Lil Wayne & Tank—“She Don’t Put It Down”
#96

This has charted, I assume, on Lil Wayne’s presence, because Budden himself is so negligible I find it hard to imagine anyone would buy one of his records for him alone. Of course, Wayne hasn’t been that much better than Budden lately, and he doesn’t do anything to recover his standing here. He is easier to understand than Budden, but given what he’s saying, that’s not much of an improvement.

Krewella—“Alive”
#99

One disadvantage to the rapid embrace of EDM by just about everybody is that it has driven a lot of the minor artists who first brought the sound to the charts onto the sidelines (anybody else remember Cascada?). So it’s something of a pleasant surprise to see someone totally new make the charts on the formula. Not a great record, maybe not even a good one, but simpler and less aggressive than a lot of the big name EDM attempts, and hence a more enjoyable listen. I don’t expect to hear from Krewella ever again, but that doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy them while they’re here.

Alabama Shakes—“Hold On”
#100

I wish this was better, I really do. I like to see people with legitimate musical sensibilities succeed, even if they can easily be lumped in with pretentious hacks like The Black Keys or Mumford & Sons. Brittany Howard has a voice, but she has a tendency to play up the worst sort of pseudo-blues phrasing. She often gets it just right, but too often she sounds like she’s either faking it or trying too hard. It would help if she had a more finished song to work with; this one sounds like a rough sketch. And though it’s no surprise that Howard’s vocals are sometimes reminiscent of Janis Joplin, the band’s application of the same earnest semi-competence as Big Brother may be carrying the idea of honoring your influences a little too far.

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In Limbo
Hot 100 Roundup—1/5/13

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

In real life, this is the last Hot 100 of 2012, not the first of 2013, but since Billboard starts and ends their year ten days ahead of the rest of the world, in Chartland we’re already into the new year. Trying to sort all of this out would be as confusing as straightening out the dates in 19th century Russian history, before they adopted the Gregorian calendar; it isn’t worth the trouble, and it would make my head hurt. So even though these will be officially listed as hitting the chart in 2013, it was actually 2012, though if you don’t care to remember that it doesn’t matter. A place in limbo is all these records deserve anyway.

Cassadee Pope—“Cry”
#60

Kid Cudi—“King Wizard”
#95

Cudi is smart, but he isn’t a genius. “King Wizard” sounds like the foundation for a brilliant track, the concept and the music are perfectly meshed and in place, but Cudi doesn’t seem to know where to go after that. He’s still thinking his way through instead of letting his instincts take flight. For all his bragging, much of which is earned, I’m not sure he trusts himself. “King Wizard” never steps over the line into pretension or egocentric folly, but it doesn’t go anywhere, either.

Ke$ha—“C’mon”
#99

“C’mon” has more life to it than “Die Young”, but it still sounds rote, and Ke$ha appears to have little interest in making this sort of record anymore. It’s not just her performance—it’s the words, the music, everything. All the touches and details that made “Tik-Tok” and “Sleazy” such enjoyable records have disappeared. She’s painting by numbers, and she isn’t even trying to color outside the lines.

Casey James—“Crying On A Suitcase”
#100

“Crying On a Suitcase” isn’t a bad song—the chorus is standard issue but I like the tumbling, headlong rush of the verses—and in the hands of a good singer it could be a decent record. But Casey James isn’t a good singer: his voice is thin, and he doesn’t seem to have enough control of his breath to give those verses the flow they need to come across with their full power. I appreciate his trying to avoid the John Mayerish trap he could easily fall into (and that the producers of American Idol encouraged), but he needs to find another way.

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Does “Mid-turbo” Equal “Wimpy”?

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

There have been a couple of interesting pieces in Billboard recently by Sean Ross, who worries (I think) that pop radio is in danger of becoming “wimpy”. This would appear to be a bad thing. It’s hard to tell, since Ross doesn’t define wimpy in any concrete terms. He bases his discussion on tempo, so I assume he’s worrying about too many ballads taking over the airwaves (don’t tell him about the new Bruno Mars single). He seems equally worried, though, about mid-tempo tracks that by being relatively busy in terms of production and arrangement are essentially disguised as up-tempo. He calls these records “mid-turbo”.

It’s all a matter of BPM translating into PPM, if you get my drift. If not, it basically means that the higher the beats per minute, the higher a station’s score is likely to be on Arbitron’s “Portable People Meter”, which is used to determine ratings. There are times I wonder if Ross is writing in code, one that only radio programmers can understand, but I think I get the general idea, which is that pop stations should essentially be party stations, providing an almost constant up. Until that is, the audience decides they want to be brought down.

At the moment, that seems to be exactly what they do want. As Ross mentions, we’re coming out of a period that some DJs described as “turbo” (hence “mid-turbo”), when party music ruled the radio, and the BPM soared. This period lasted about two years, from 2009 to 2011, and is now fading. One of the problems with mid-turbo for radio programmers, Ross suggests, is not only that the songs are slower, but the subject matter is more serious. It’s the morning after the turbo party, and as they nurse their hangovers, people are taking a minute or two to reflect.

I think much of what Ross says is true, especially from a programmer’s perspective (his observations about dubstep are spot on), but his choice of words, especially “wimpy”, suggests that he’s throwing too much of his personal taste into the argument. His description of James Taylor’s and Joni Mitchell’s music and their audience is wrong on any number of levels (just to mention one: most of Joni Mitchell’s radio hits—“You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio)”, “Free Man In Paris”, Raised On Robbery”—were mid- or up-tempo, not ballads). But maybe wimpy is code for something else. Whatever the case, it will all change in another year or so anyway. It always does.

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I don’t make lists. I’ve made a list.

Friday, April 6th, 2012

Even before they became the bane of the internet, I was never big on lists. Sometimes I enjoy them, and if they’re well done they can serve as a spark to thinking about things in a different way, but too often, instead of contextualizing or re-contextualizing, they de-contextualize , hiding the essence of a piece of art by pasting it over with shallow similarities or comparisons to others. This is especially true of “best of” lists, whether they focus on a particular period of time, a particular genre, or at their worst, specific stylistic flourishes or the use of instruments (“best guitar riff played on a Telecaster run through a fuzz box and a digital delay system without the use of a wah-wah pedal”, etc.). Though I’m well aware that some performers and songs and bodies of work are better than others, I don’t like ranking them against each other—I’m far more interested in what a performer achieves or doesn’t achieve within the context of the record itself and the overall environment in which it was created. Often that means comparing one piece with another, but it doesn’t mean ranking them against each other as if their place on a list conveyed something meaningful. It doesn’t. It may be a convenient shorthand, but I would rather see it as a guide to listening (or viewing or reading) than as a judgment of relative value. I always remember what Pauline Kael said in the early 60s, in reference to Jean Renoir being listed as the world’s greatest living movie director: that being ranked on a numbered list, no matter how high, was an insult to a true artist. Art isn’t a competition, folks, it really isn’t.

All of which verbiage is only to explain why I’ve never done much with lists on this site, even though I work off of one. I excuse this by saying that a weekly ranking of sales and popularity, though it may ultimately affect the amount of money an artist makes and their influence, if any, on others and the culture at large, doesn’t actually reflect on the artistic value of their music. In any case, though I’ve put a few lists together in the past, sometimes out of a sense of duty, sometimes as a result of a reader’s request, even when I’ve been tempted to make one I’ve usually managed to argue my way out of it. My favorite was one I made a few years ago, before I started reviewing the entire Hot 100, of songs that made the main chart but never worked their way into the top ten. That seemed like a worthwhile service because a lot of those songs, especially the ones that only managed a week or two on the charts, may not have been heard by a lot of people. I would probably still do it if I hadn’t started reviewing the entire chart; but as long as I am a list like that seems a redundant exercise.

What I loved most about that list, though, was listening to the mix I made of the songs, which I re-programmed and fiddled with for a couple of weeks until I had something that I could listen to over and over again without ever getting bored. This not only contextualized the songs, but provided a more viable and meaningful way of comparing them and, yes, even ranking them. This is what most critics do, I’m sure, when they make their own lists, and is merely a compressed version of the way long-term critical judgments (i.e., “the canon”), are ultimately made. But the lists themselves, unless they’re heavily annotated, rarely convey that.

Which is the long way of leading up to the fact that now, even with my dislike of lists in general, Spotify changes everything. Now lists, even the most arbitrary, are available for listening without you having to spend large amounts of money, scramble around on the net or in record stores, hassle your friends, or depend on serendipitous crate-digging. Even if the list itself is a de-contextualizing disaster, the ability to listen to the selections, immediately, gives it at least some value. If you feel like listening to the Hot 100 in its entirety, for instance, Billboard has conveniently created a playlist that allows you to do just that (at least, that is, those songs that are available on Spotify, which will get you 90% of the chart most weeks—which is more than enough, believe me; you don’t really want to hear all of it). Many critics, as well, are creating rolling best-of playlists throughout the year. The possibilities are endless. I await the übernerd who puts up a playlist of every Pazz and Jop Poll, or every album reviewed in Christgau’s Consumer Guide—it’s only a matter of time.

In this spirit, I have created a rolling playlist of my own: The Best of the Hot 100, 2012. For the moment, I’m only including songs that made the chart through March, but in another week or two I’ll start adding songs as they come out and include a link on the sidebar. This is not a ranked list; I’m doing my best to make this a real mix, with some sort of flow that I hope puts these songs into their proper context, or highlights exactly what I think makes them so enjoyable. I want the list to be entertaining as well as informative. It’s also, of course, highly personal—I’m indulging more of the fan side of my brain than the critical side (no, I don’t think “Sorry For Party Rocking” is a work of genius, but damn I love that sound). I have a feeling I’ll get closer to explaining the ultimate value of these records in that manner, anyway—this is pop we’re talking about, after all. I’m not even going to list the songs here; just give it a listen and see what you think.

A few programming notes:

The only criteria for inclusion is that the record has to have debuted on the Hot 100 this year. So songs that were actually released in 2011 (or older) can make the list, while songs that broke into the big time this year but had already appeared on the chart won’t. Totally arbitrary, but there have to be rules.

There is one song missing. Rascal Flatts “Changed” isn’t available on Spotify yet. I assume it will be, since the first single from the album is, but they’re most likely holding off in order to increase actual sales. In the meantime you can find it on YouTube. Just imagine it coming between “Call Me Maybe” and “Springsteen”. I’ll add it as soon as I can. I know you can’t wait for that one.

I am aware of the absence of rap. There’s a lot of great stuff out there this year, but very little of it gets onto the Hot 100. The best candidates—”Stupid Hoe”, “I Do”, “No Church In the Wild” (relatively old, but it hit the chart in February), “Muthafucka Up”, and V.I.C.’s “Wobble”—were hard to fit into the mix and are all flawed in some essential way (at least to my ears). I may make a separate rap mix, or I may find a way to work them in later.

I will most likely freeze the list for a couple of weeks at the end of each quarter, and possibly write up a brief summary. Otherwise, it will be under constant change: songs added, songs dropped, programming shifting around. Stay tuned.

Update: I knew the nerds were out there, but damn, here you go. Every record available on Spotify that has hit the Billboard chart from 1946 through 2011. 5370 songs. A lot missing from the early years, of course, but this should fill up your weekend.

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Piracy schmiracy, what if it’s radio that kills sales?

Monday, February 28th, 2011

A couple of weeks ago Billboard’s print edition ran a fascinating graph (for some reason it’s not in the online version of the article) charting sales of Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck [Forget] You” against its place on the Mainstream Top 40 radio chart. For the first couple of months radio play and sales ran pretty much in parallel, rising and falling together. But somewhere in its third month of release something strange happened: the song dropped off the airplay chart, and as soon as it did, shot up the digital chart, more than doubling its sales in two weeks. A few weeks later it reappeared on the airplay chart, where it’s been slowly rising ever since. But as airplay has risen, sales have dropped in almost exact inverse proportion to the song’s airplay ranking.

This may be a singular phenomenon (and the jump in sales may have been related to the song’s appearance on Glee), but it would be interesting to track other records and see if the same thing holds. It makes perfect sense, after all, that people would avoid buying a record as long as they can hear it on a regular basis on radio. I was reminded of this yesterday when I was reading Chris Molanphy’s presentation at this year’s EMP conference (I wasn’t able to go this year, but a PDF of Molanphy’s talk can be downloaded here). In it he discusses the way the major labels tried to kill the single in the ’90s by creating radio hits but refusing to release actual singles. Records would remain on the airplay charts for months at a time, quite possibly because it was the only inexpensive way for people to hear music they loved without paying an exorbitant price for it (not that the albums didn’t sell, but you have to wonder how many singles might have been sold if they had ever been released). The same phenomenon still exists, to some degree, on the Adult Contemporary Airplay chart, where records can remain in the top ten for months at a time while barely selling at all.

This has been said many times before, but people are always going to seek out the least expensive option of hearing something as ephemeral as pop music. It’s as if they already know that they’ll get tired of it soon enough, and don’t see the point in making a major investment. Maybe the labels’ problem is that they refuse to recognize the ephemerality of the music they’re making; they think they can sell it forever, even when most of the time they’re lucky to keep people interested for more than two months.

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History is hard

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

As anyone who cares already knows, today is the day Billboard changes the rules for its album charts and allows releases older than 18 months to appear on the Top 200. Considering the season, it’s no surprise that a large number of those older LPs are Christmas records. There seem to be some problems with the historical numbers, though. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is correctly shown with a peak position of 1. Oddly enough, though, The Beatle’s remasters, all of which also went to number one in their original release, show totally different peak postions. The White Album, for instance, shows a peak position of 152, it’s current position on the chart, despite being number 1 for nine weeks in 1968. The listing for Abbey Road is even more confusing. It was number 1 for 11 weeks, but Billboard shows its peak as 69, a number that makes no sense since its current position is 118 and it wasn’t on the chart last week. The remaster also made top ten on the old Comprehensive chart, so they can’t be referring to that, either. Perhaps not coincidentally, however, 69 does match up with the year of Abbey Road’s original release. It’s enough to make you wonder if they’re still doing these things by hand.

Update (11/30/09): The numbers are correct in the print edition, but are still wrong in both online versions of the chart. Guess nobody proofs the web sites.

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Now wait a minute…

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Anya Marina’s cover of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like”, which I reviewed in my last New this week post, is bad enough, but in Billboard—or at least the Hot 100 chart (both in print and on the Billboard.biz site, but only available by subscription)—she’s also credited with writing it. This will no doubt come as a surprise to the four guys who are credited on the original version, including T.I. himself. Did she think he wouldn’t notice while he was in jail? Or did he give the rights to her as part of his community service? If the latter, he should do a little extra time for contempt of court.

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Worth watching

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

This may not make any immediate difference, but Nielsen Business Media is reportedly selling Billboard, and a host of other entertainment trade magazines, to News Communications Inc., which also owns Who’s Who and the insiderish political magazine The Hill. I wouldn’t expect any immediate changes, but I would love to see the equivalent of The Hill’s all-encompassing reporting applied to the music industry.

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Michael Jackson continues to fiddle with the music business

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Billboard has announced changes in some of their album charts for the coming year. Aside from a rearrangement of how the R&B album chart is counted and the addition of a Folk Music chart (how that will be defined seems open to question), the biggest change is in the Top 200 Albums chart, which will now be based solely on sales, regardless of release date. Since 1991, Billboard has taken albums that were over two years old (later amended to 18 months) off the chart. In the last year, however, especially after the death of Michael Jackson (now the biggest selling artist of the year) and the release of the Beatles Remasters, that formula has been called into question (the change only affects the Top 200; all the other album charts will still drop LPs over 18 months old).

It’s not a surprise decision. People have been murmuring about the chart not being an honest reflection of popularity for a while now, and since the record labels are probably making more money off of re-issues these days than new releases, it will provide a more accurate reflection of commercial realities, as well. We’ll be seeing a lot more MJ and Beatles (not to mention Bob Marley, Creedence, and The Eagles), which isn’t necessarily a good thing, but we’ll also be seeing a lot fewer albums that have barely scraped 20,000 sold in the top ten.

It may not be what the record labels want (they were the biggest supporters of the exclusionary rule, since it put more focus on new releases), but at least it will give everyone a better idea of what the public wants, and it also seems to play into Billboard’s own business development plan. I can’t help but wonder if Billboard’s decision isn’t partly driven by the fact that they now make the entire Top 200 available on their website, with links to purchase charted albums. Not only will it be less confusing to the layman audience that comes by their site, but it also ensures that only the most popular records are available for sale. I’m sure the editorial/commercial divide at Billboard is fairly strict, but the company has been slowly moving toward becoming not just an information provider, but a player in the music business itself (a move that’s even more direct outside the US, where Billboard stages awards shows and owns concert venues). I still trust their numbers, but more and more I’m beginning to doubt their motives.

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Who says singles don’t build slowly anymore?

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

I first mentioned The Ting Tings’s “That’s Not My Name” over a year ago, when it was a hit in the UK. Finally released as a single in the US near the end of the year, it crawled, slowly, up into the mid-fifties on the Hot 100, stayed for the full 20 weeks Billboard allows records below the top 40 that have stopped growing, and then, in June, disappeared. It stayed on the Hot Singles Recurrents chart, though (where, until Michael Jackson’s death, it was Number 1), and never left the iTunes top 40. Now, thanks to a sudden rise in sales and airplay (including, of all places, Radio Disney), it’s back on the Hot 100.

I’ve never understood why this wasn’t a bigger hit–it’s a great record, and if something as un-pop as “Paper Planes” could go top five, there’s no reason why this, which bears some resemblance to the Black Eyed Peas, only with more of a post-punk as opposed to techno feel–also more simplicity, more artfulness, and greater depth–shouldn’t be a smash as well. Isn’t it time some post-punk inspired dance music made the top ten? What they need is some swift media exposure, like a guest spot on the Jonas Brothers show or something. In September they’re touring with P!nk. That should help.

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