S.F.J.: Who are Billboard’s charts for?
C.M.:
Billboard’
s stock answer is that the charts are for the industry. But I have long argued that the Hot 100 is not actually useful, day to day, for a record executive trying to do his job. It is an amalgam of a bunch of streams of data to produce one authoritative barometer of the biggest hits in the U.S.A. That’s enormously useful to the public—or, at least as long as that chart remains authoritative, it’s a handy benchmark. But if you’re, say, a radio programmer trying to figure out what to program, the Hot 100 will only get you so far before you have to kind of figure out, “O.K., but what works for my market? Or what works for the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-old females that I’m targeting?”
But, for the public, the Hot 100 is an excellent Dow Jones Industrial Average of pop music for America.
I would say that, to some extent, the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart is the same thing. It’s more useful as a gut check or a benchmark for the industry on the biggest, most credible black, or urban—pick your euphemism—records in the United States.
So, how do you come up with a pop-chart metric, like R. & B. and hip-hop, that’s neither arbitrary nor overly narrow?
One of the big reasons the Hot 100 has it easy is because it’s all genres; we call it the pop chart, but anything can appear on the Hot 100. If a catchy Gregorian chant came out tomorrow—in fact, about twenty years ago, a catchy Gregorian chant did appear on the Hot 100—it would chart there. Whereas the genre charts that I speak about in this article all have this definitional problem.
Why not get rid of all the genre charts, publish a Hot 500, and add genre tag to each song? The chart would lean more heavily on better data, and let the reader sort out the relevant groupings. It’s not as if charts are a challenging read, especially in an age of constant data visualization.
I mean, sure, that would do an end-run around the problem of not being able to isolate genre-specific data in the digital age—one big chart for everybody. But I think it’d be a shame. I think it’s still useful to track the music a subculture is consuming, separate from the mass audience, and that it should still be possible—even in an era of big data—to pinpoint and pry apart that subculture.
I think the way
Billboard solves this problem—and they had it right for about forty years, before they changed the chart methodology in 2012—is to make these genres about the audience, not about the definition of music. And as long as there’s broad agreement over what the center of a genre is, you don’t have to agree about all of the boundaries, because that’s impossible and ever-shifting. But as long we can more or less agree about what the center of country is, what the center of R. & B. and hip-hop is, then you sort of say, “O.K., now let’s identify people who are fans of that center of the music and track what they like.” Then the boundaries to some extent take care of themselves. Because if people who congregate in black record stores or listen to Hot 97 suddenly decide that they like Lorde, it’s okay for Lorde to appear on the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart, because that group of people is actually consuming that song.
On the other hand, we’ve actually got a system now whereby, in order for something to appear on the charts, there’s a gatekeeper in the sky, which in this case is Billboard, saying that the Lorde record is R. & B., but this Bruno Mars song is not. In this system, you get into the quicksand of who qualifies, what are the edges, what are the boundaries? And that’s a mess.
If you’re going to come up with a credible chart, I feel like you don’t want to be in the business of defining what the boundaries of that genre are. Like, just to pick something off the top of my head, twenty-four years ago,
the British duo DNA remixed Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” and it actually charted in the Top 10 of the R. & B. chart. It didn’t just make the top five of the Hot 100; it actually made the Top 10 on the R. & B. chart. Why? Did some gatekeeper in the sky say, “Suzanne Vega is now black enough for us to put her on this chart?” No, of course not. What actually happened was that black radio stations and black-owned or R. & B.-centric record stores were playing and selling that record in quantity; ergo it appeared on the R. & B. chart.
you're being a revisionist
