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

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1549388/baauers-harlem-shake-debuts-atop-revamped-hot-100

Counting Spotify streams clearly makes some kind of sense, counting Youtube views is just insane, especially if they are weighted as highly as they appear to be based on that article. "Gangnam Style" would have been number one for months if this had been implemented sooner.

it's just going to lead to more hegemony, which i think is the opposite of their intention?

yeah my whole thing at this point is i'm not even so against counting streaming/youtube/etc in charts as how heavily they weigh it, how it can just trump every other factor and put something at #1. (xp)

labels are going to pour even more money into stupid-ass 'lyric videos'

Spotify listeners at least are generally listening seriously as opposed to for lolz

Lame either way

I mean, it's also #1 on iTunes so it's not like only YouTube but it's absolutely asinine that it's rated as 3.5 times more popular than the next most song ("Thrift Shop" which clearly deserves to be #1 on popularity though not song merit).

it's just going to lead to more hegemony, which i think is the opposite of their intention?

― J0rdan S., Wednesday, February 20, 2013 8:40 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Spotify top tracks stay the same for ages, pumped up kicks is probably still number one

I can thank The New Paradigm for today's marvel: walking into the student union to watch 500 undergrads performing "Harlem Shuffle" or whatever it's called in the pit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMyFgOmu0w8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMyFgOmu0w8

surprised you didn't post the marvelous Stones video

I've never really fuxed with the Stones tbh

Cultural stuff aside: wouldn't it be really easy for labels to game the system by having computers running scripts to keep refreshing youtube videos?

I mean I know there was payola in radio but at least there's some honor & dignity to giving free cocaine to dudes that look like martin mull

*furiously refreshes papoose youtube*

mean I know there was payola in radio but at least there's some honor & dignity to giving free cocaine to dudes that look like martin mull

why Martin Mull when Clive Davis is the industry prototype?

I'm a lot more interested in the cultural stuff than the numbers shit at this point and it feels like af-am culture is getting an ever-increasingly raw deal. :/

Cultural stuff aside: wouldn't it be really easy for labels to game the system by having computers running scripts to keep refreshing youtube videos?

― in a chef-driven ambulance (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, February 20, 2013 10:07 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

theoretically the same has been true since they've been putting Spotify stats in charts, you could just play a song over and over and over. i kind of imagine the effect is negligible, but then YouTube stats have been famously hacked/juked many times, this seems to be just asking for shenanigans.

Like it feels like black people have been pretty central to the american cultural discourse at all points in my life except the past few years.

mean I know there was payola in radio but at least there's some honor & dignity to giving free cocaine to dudes that look like martin mull

why Martin Mull when Clive Davis is the industry prototype?

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 20, 2013 9:12 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I meant djs

"wouldn't it be really easy for labels to game the system by having computers running scripts to keep refreshing youtube videos?"

why would the labels pay for it when fans do it for free

I was thinking more in the early stages, just to push it towards hot counts where it might get featured on the front page or suggested videos

I mean, sure, never underestimate the power of people to throw money at things (well, some things), but that's the unspoken wink behind all the fan-activation stuff, premieres, etc.: "support view-spam the shit out of this!" and obviously I don't have raw numbers / more certainly couldn't hurt, but it seems kids with too much spare time do a pretty good job of this on their own.

come to think of it, I'd probably be more surprised if labels weren't already doing this / just now started.

"support the artist! AS MANY VIEWS AS YOU CAN HANDLE!" that is.

yeah i mean before "Gangnam Style" the most viewed music video on YouTube of all time was Bieber, and i think that was less 'he has the most fans/they watch his video over and over' and more 'his fans are so rabid that they're hell bent on driving up his views and making him #1'

I definitely had a friend who had a temp job that involved phoning in requests to TRL back in the day. soooo...

haha wow

Is this the first big instrumental hit since Crazy Frog? Why is Thrift Shop still listed as #1 at billboard.com?

Is Harlem Shake an instrumental track? If so, it might be the first since ... I wanna say Miami Vice Theme? ... to hit number one.

it has vocal samples but yeah i'd consider it an instrumental

Yeah, so is "The Hustle."

yep, miami vice. http://tunecaster.com/charts/music/instrumental-top-10-4.html

most of those last big instrumental hits were tied to movies or tv shows too. axel f, miami vice theme, & chariots of fire. kenny g was pretty much the last big non movie related instrumental hit. kenny g killed the instrumental for 25 years!

(spitballing below, I really should formulate this into an actual pitch or something)

yeah, like I said, no fucking way labels aren't already (at least) implicitly encouragingthis / nurturing fan communities to explicitly encourage this. like calling into radio, maybe, except people on that end who can theoretically give a shit / run QC are replaced with automatically generated viewcounts that don't (and programmers who, let's be honest, have no real incentive to care, even if they didn't also overlap with the sort of person who'd be into the idea of baauer / macklemore hitting no. 1. which is a stereotype yes but probably true.)

honestly I don't really have a problem with this in principle -- I'm no Luddite*, if you just look solely at the medium it really is the same thing as calling in requests or whatever, in a way -- but it's the sort of variable that probably, in practice, adds far more weight to virality/memedom than actual musical popularity**. which is of course from a business perspective a feature, not a bug -- and not even new with these changes (gotye, carly rae jepsen, etc) -- but yeah, it is kind of fucked that Baauer has a No. 1 hit when 75% of the people responsible for doing this for him have no idea who the sam hill Baauer is. not even on a "oh, the girl who did 'Call Me Maybe'" level --- not at all. which makes for an excellent chart for measuring the best ways of emulating OK Go videos, but as a music chart, or at least something that tries to be one...?

now! when the bigger problems will happen is either if/when this takes on more weight, which, who knows; or when it jumps to the genre charts. which you know it will.

* was trying to google an old tumblr post of mine and I came across a very angry, very evangelical tech-blog guy accusing me of this, which, lol

** I mean, I can see the argument that some audiences/genre audiences listen to their music solely on YouTube, and that this will benefit them, but I just can't see that being statistically significant on a Hot 100 scale. anyone who reaches that sort of critical mass tends to find other streams open up to them to supplant YouTube.

I just want to post this, I know it's not on topic or anything. ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U15HQJwqslo

it is kind of crazy that gangnam style never hit #1. how is that not the most popular song of 2012?

wait, this counts all music featured in some random dudes youtube vid? it seems like it wouldn't be hard to just include the views on the official videos, which makes more sense. otherwise you might as well count the music you hear blasting out of car stereos or w/e, its not intentional listening

the music blasting out of car stereos has always been counted (via radio airplay being factored in)

Most of the views for "Harlem Shake" aren't even the whole song, it's just for the first 30 seconds. How much of the song has to be on the video for it to count? I really don't understand why Billboard isn't just limiting this to official videos.

Billboard is counting 30 second videos, and starting it this week, precisely to capitalize on "Harlem Shake" and show off how 'with it' they are for being able to measure its popularity. i was reading a Billboard.biz article a few days ago about how the technology for recognizing whether a copyrighted song is used in just-uploaded YouTubes is really advanced now so Baauer's been generating instant royalties every time one of these videos gets made.

smh is billboard gonna change its rules with every new meme to show how "with it" they are

Damn I just realized that "Friday" would have been a top 10 hit if this had been in place at that time.

it even made the bbc
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/21534066

Damn I just realized that "Friday" would have been a top 10 hit if this had been in place at that time.

― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Thursday, February 21, 2013 7:36 AM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

God I didn't think of that

all pop music is just a menagerie of memes set to the illusion of music iirc

Rebecca Black definitely would've been #1

hopefully there will be another rebecca black event to showcase how absurd billboard is now

billboard should be nationalized and taken over by the government so this shit doesn't happen

it'd be a good time in history for somebody to get serious about making a competing chart tbh. It's weird to me that this idea of Billboard as the immoveable object of popularity measurement is so instilled - that it's "The Chart," still? get w/it people who give a shit about this stuff

Let's do it.