Mid-Sweep Rant: aka What Happened to the Charts this Week...

 
Before I start with part two of this week's "chart sweeps" of the latest songs making their way on to the weekly music charts at Billboard magazine,  I need to bring up what happened at the magazine this week. From the time that the chart gods started electronically monitoring what radio stations played in the early 90s until last week, the rock, R&B, Country, dance, and Latin subcharts were solely based on airplay, graphing a song's broadcast to a station's Neilsen rating to estimate an "audience impression" score, which would determine the ranking. With the advent of digital sales, I've been really interested in a revised chart that would take sales into account, since there are big hit songs (at the top of my head, "Goodbye Earl" at country) that didn't do as well on radio. Well Billboard did finally pull through with this, but in effect possibly neutered their whole chart system as a result.

Instead of using the existing genre radio panel with sales added in, Billboard decided to use all airplay across the board, adding sales, and then adding streaming detections (like the Hot 100 does) over listener-controlled sites like Spotify and Rhapsody. Their rational is since the two components of sales and streaming cannot be "assigned" by a genre, it was in their interest of fairness to also make airplay all-inclusive, in the magazine's editorship's opinion that it would truly reflect their "entire" popularity of a song that fits in a particular box. But what the biggest effect of that decision is that songs that may have little to no airplay at any rock, R&B, or country stations may by their overwhelming success on another format end up dominating the chart, and have the high risk of not only hindering independent and new artists (who on an average work in a particular genre), but also give an unfair advantage to pre-ordained "crossover" hits that could clog up the top of the chart and possibly cause some artists to be overlooked simply because they may be doing ok at say rock radio, but unable to pull in the numbers of say, Train, or Rihanna. And with it being an editorial decision which "genre" a song may fall into , and in fact may fall into more than one, the idea of "chart manipulation" that the whole monitoring thing was supposed to end may come back, but in a different way. I'll discuss that part more on the country side of the house as well...

How it changes with rock is a little more esoteric than say, R&B or Country - there's a giant leeway on what's considered "rock music", from folk-rock to heavy metal to hardcore to funk-rock to a truckload of other hybrids, and a song's "rock" credentials are a little more vague. Do the presence of "guitars" do it? Does the loudness of the singer voice? Does the absence of an instrument? Looking back at the past, would an artist like Rick James, who often had guitar solos, be considered eligible for the "rock chart"? How about songs that had minor success on the rock chart, like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" or Hall & Oates' "Maneater"? If this method could go back in time, these mainstream pop or R&B hits that crossed over by even a little could possibly dominate the chart for weeks just on the momentum of its success in another genre, thus diluting the impact of the individual subcharts.

And while I'm happy of course that Billboard says in their defense that they're keeping the airplay-only charts, pretty much shouldn't they have to? I mean, since the magazine is meant to be at first a reference for the industry, wouldn't they need to service the radio stations that subscribe to it with valid info regarding the music they play? Would a rock station find Billboard helpful otherwise? If Train topped the rock list for 20 weeks, would it either cause the chart to be ignored by the radio industry or make them (consciously or not) slip closer to mainstream pop just because? And would it could artists to add an element or too of one thing or another to "bring it" to another chart? I can see a Rihanna single adding a banjo, a fuzzed-up guitar solo, and a Latin interlude just to create havoc. FO reals, Taylor Swift is close to that point now.

Now I know that Billboard has gotten a lot of push-back from a lot of the casual readers who are much more involved with whatever fan base they may claim part of. (Honestly, if there's some sort of Swift versus Underwood thing, I don't get it. They both would score massive advantages by this new system.) I have no skin in that part of the game. I'm a fan of Swift's music, as I am of Rihanna's (both their personal lives, though, leave a lot to be desired to say the least). I certainly wouldn't be clamoring for a chart propped up by one promotion or another, and I wouldn't want a song excluded "just because". Maybe I'll become at peace once weeks go on, and I can see how the charts "flow" (yeah, I'm totally OCD like that). But as I said, I'm afraid that the beauty of discovering new music and the amount of acts getting a shot may be diminished by this change. I know there's the "well there's the [insert genre] airplay chart" argument, but in the low-information reality, when you have to preface a success with "well, it was top-10 on so-and-so 'airplay'", it seems like a hedge. If you're #1 country, you're #1 on Country Songs. End of story. Say Taylor Swift is #1 for a dozen weeks with the undeniably pop "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". (Though she is a slippery slope on that one, since she got promoted airplay for a short while, "justifying" the inclusion. I wonder if somebody pays "promotes" a song enough, will country radio play it regardless?) All the airplay #1s in country music, even if they have respectable sales for country but not on the scale of Swift, would be like carrying an asterisk to their chart success. And that's what I disliked about the chart back in the 90s, where huge radio hits like "Don't Speak" or "Iris" would be chart footnotes since they didn't have a physical single at the time.

As for the R&B chart, the same arguments apply, especially with pure pop acts like George Michael and Hall & Oates getting a smidgen of airplay on R&B stations - would you include those? What would be the deciding factor on what's an R&B record, and if so, does it's pop success overshadow its competitors on the chart? And it's sad that the former 100-position R&B chart is now reduced to only 50 spots on the composite chart and 75 on airplay. (The same applies to the Country Songs list, with airplay at 60 positions).

 As of now, the "dance" charts aren't touched (well, the DJ-polled club play list isn't much more than a promotional tool as it is, and the airplay chart pool is comparatively really small), but the impact of mainstream pop hits on that chart would pretty much kill the independent underground dance movement on the charts (unless possibly the composite chart was expanded to like 75 places). With pop/rock/even country songs remixed for the dancefloor, would all versions count towards a dance hit's points? Oh lord, the crazy possibilities (I'm thinking the "How Do I Live" remix situation here).

As for the good side to this, and yes, there is a good side, the inclusion of sales does give a veracity to the charts that was lacking, and even though I may disagree that including all sales while not including all airplay aren't mutually exclusive things, I'm not one of those that yelling "bring the torches" or screaming threats of never reading the rag again. In fact, I just renewed my subscription, and for someone who is not part of the "Industry" or gets any compensation for it, plunking down 300 smackeroos a year for a magazine is a pretty big commitment. But I've trusted Billboard for over 30 years of my own life, and I'm gonna ride this out to see how it pans. I do hope the people who run the joint (and I know it must not be a real cash cow) take at least some of the constructive points to mind, since as I know the charts, nothing is ever set in stone, nor is it static. Also, with the new lists, they're amending the recurrent rules so songs ranked over #25 or under 20 weeks won't be dropped to that status, which lately has been wreaking weirdness on the country chart, reminding me of the 80s when songs would tumble to nowhere after peaking. (I hope they do this on the airplay charts as well).

I had thought last night that there could be a "compromise" whereas if you took the percentage of genre airplay versus allaround airplay (like country stations airplay as a fraction of all the airplay the song is getting), and take that fraction of the sales and streaming tallies, it may help balance things out. I know in my heart Billboard may have qualms on that, since again it attempts to predict a portion of the sales customer's intent, but hey, I'm throwing it out there. (Example:Rihanna's "Diamonds" R&B airplay is 20% of the total airplay of the song across all genres. You would add 20% of the sales and 20% of the streaming numbers to that).

As for my "chart sweeps", I'm going to use the "airplay" lists for the "Rock", "R&B", and "Country" sweeps, for at least now. The biggest reason is that I feel there will be too much repetition between lists and I'll end up posting the same music over and over again (some of that happens now, but I do that to explain the history of the acts in each genre). Also, there's right now too much volatility in the composite charts - this week there are 27 "debuts" out of the 50 songs on the Rock Songs list alone, and 13 of those are Mumford & Sons album cuts that may be doing well streaming, but not played on the radio. Not only would it have made the post overwhelming in YouTube clips (if I can find each song), but also I already covered six of those tracks on the Hot 100 "pop sweep" last week. And I much prefer "official" videos as it is. I think I'll mention who's #1 on the composites either way, and maybe once this whole thing settles I may change it, but for now, I think it's more fun checking out the airplay tracks, discovering little nuggets you may not have heard (especially on rock radio, where there is mainstream, modern, active, heritage, and Triple-A formats).

I know a bunch of "chart geeks" find their way here, and I'm very grateful. When I was a kid, I honestly felt I really was the only person on the planet who cares about this stuff. I want to ask you - what do you think of these changes? Are they a sign of the times, or are they a "watering down" of music diversity with the best of intentions? I'd love to hear your take. (I know you may need to jump a hoop to comment, but it's only to prevent spammers and trolls from getting their dirty hands off my lil' ol' corner of the intertubes. Thanks for understanding.)

Footnote: After I finished writing this post after midnight last night, went and read this excellent take on the subject I found when looking for the link to the changes article. It touches on a lot of the points I make here, and more. Check it out.