twostepcubchart - the evolution...

Hey, I'm trying to get my groove back on, and the biggest part of that is my music. Total geek admission: when I was a youngun I would be obsessed with Casey Kasem. With all the craziness around me, every Sunday for four hours there was a reliable pattern of "Shaggy" going through the 40 songs that Billboard magazine computed as the top songs in the country. Back then (the beginning of the 80s) pop, rock, disco, R&B, and country stood side by side, and Casey can go from Joan Jett to the Gap Band to A Flock Of Seagulls to Ronnie Milsap, and this little kid was exposed to all kinds of current music, when radio wasn't so compartmentalized as it is now. At the time, the Billboard chart was compiled by tabulating lists provided to them by radio stations and records stores of what they were playing or selling. Of course it wasn't even close to scientific, and prone to fudgery and speculation, but it produced week after week a chart that progressed like one of those perpetual movement displays at the museum. Songs would debut, slowly and progressively climb the chart, reach its peak (mostly staying there 2-4 weeks), then just as methodically descend. As a regular listener I would sit and right down the songs as he's counting down, predicting from the week before where each song would be, and since things were so methodical in those days it'd be pretty easy to be pretty close. And in those years I retained a memory of where songs peaked, and the current top 40, like some "Rain Man" of pop music history.

Starting in 1991, Billboard started using valid sales and airplay data collected by electronically scanning hundreds of radio stations and collected scans of sales of record stores, and everything changed. Songs could jump right up the list, and bounce up and down based on actual sales data. However, even then, since the sales were are physical, songs would still move slowly (and sometimes even slower), since peoples' tastes would hang on to songs much longer. The newest thing was that songs could debut really high, since the magazine had a policy that a song couldn't hit the chart until a single was physically available. Kasem was replaced by Shadoe Stevens , even though a growing amount of "gangsta rap" music crept in, the top-40 order kept everythng in my little mind "legitimate". AT40 stopped in 1995, and in no way was I succumbing to Rick Dees and a "bogus" chart.

Through the nineties as record companies held back releasing singles to pump up album/CD sales, and after the success of No Doubt's "Don't Speak", which topped the monitored airplay list for sixteen weeks but not to be found on Billboard's Top 40 (or 100) at all, the floodgates opened where at least five more singles were so massive as to top the airplay chart without being able to say it was a Billboard #1 Pop hit (well, unless they fudged the definition a little). All that changed in 1998, where songs could chart whether a physical single was released or not. That actually for a while "calmed" the charts down, where songs wouldn't just debut high the week a single was in stores.

Then came I-Tunes.

The biggest revolution in music sales came with the mass appeal of the music provider. There were three major attributes to buying music at I-Tunes that made it such a huge success. First, one wasn't constrained on what they could find at a record store. There was no "Out of stock" sign for something either too popular or too obscure. Second, albums can for the most part be bought track by track, so you don't have to wait for a single to be released to by it, and you don't have to buy the whole album if you like one or two songs on it. And third, the sales are instant. As opposed to ordering by mail, I-Tunes allowed you to purchase a song faster than any other method. If you hear a song on the radio, boom, you can buy it. See something on TV you liked? Get the song right away. That factor created chaos, where songs would bounce all over the chart like a pinball, and you'd never know when or where a song would peak.

I still am an "chart freak", as it were. I subscribe to Billboard, but I don't memorize the "Hot 100" like I used to. The closest thing to the "pop"chart in its purest form is the Adult Top 40, though it's only an airplay chart, and the country chart, adult R&B and dance airplay chart are great, though you can never extrapolate sales info into them. (Billboard's Dance Club Play is a totally separate animal, relying on reports from anonymous DJ's and only useful as a framework for what's out there. ).

Back in the day, I had made my own little top-40 lists, and in 2005 I revamped it to a weekly top-100 list, since I couldn't whittle the large amount of music I listened to to 40 songs. Gleaning from the pop, rock, country, dance, and R&B charts, I eventually dabbled into and included more international charts (France, Germany) as I explored music I never would've been been exposed to before the internet (and specifically YouTube).

I still look forward to getting the new charts (now online) every Thursday and compiling my own "twostepcubchart" every week. One of the first regular things I posted on the blog was this chart, and since I've been incorporating videos when I can find them, and hopefully can expose you to some music that you may not have heard before, and might like. I appreciate you reading, and feel free to comment on any of the new tunes I've posted. The next chart will be on the next post. See you there!