Idolator
This week's Billboard Hot 100 may look a little different. thanks to some new data being added into the chart-tabulating mix: Tallies of streamed songs from Yahoo and AOL will now count towards a song's chart position. In a Billboard.com piece noting the change, chart guru Geoff Mayfield notes that this data will account for only about 5% of the chart's total points, meaning that the shift won't be as seismic as the one that accompanied digital tracks' introduction into the Hot 100. To figure out just what sort of effects these changes would have in the next edition of the Hot 100, we nabbed our own chart expert, Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, for a quick IM chat:
itsdennisobell: Effects will be fascinating
itsdennisobell: It could even rob Sean Kingston of #1 this week
itsdennisobell: He's been climbing the Hot 100 w/a hand tied behind his back bec. until last week there was no "Beautiful Girls" download avail.
itsdennisobell: last week they dropped "BG" and it's already #1 at iTunes, & it seems sure to do what every other big radio hit has done this year — shoot the song to #1 in one fell swoop...
itsdennisobell: UNLESS the new streams rule gives, say, Fergie a boost
mauraatidolator: uggh
itsdennisobell: I know
itsdennisobell: The recalibration of the Hot 100 generally reduces iTunes' role — I suspect bec. it was pissing the labels off how big an efect it's been having
mauraatidolator: yeah
itsdennisobell: They want to get it back to leaning toward airplay, which is much more methodical and consistent (and manipulable)
itsdennisobell: truthfully, even I thought the sales component on the H100 needed to be dialed back a bit — it had gotten so outsize. A song with absolutely zero airplay (e.g. the High School Musical songs last year) could shoot into the top 10 with just a week's worth of fat sales
Next week, we'll be on the lookout for the chart position of Carrie Underwood's "So Small," which is currently streaming at AOL, but not available as a download. We wonder if more stream sources are on the going to be added to the Hot 100 mix soon—after all, there are tons of them out there (in particular, MySpace, although truth be told there's a very low possibility that the chaotic site will ever get its shit together enough to collect said data) and while AOL and Yahoo! may have a fair amount of legit pop exclusives, they're certainly not the only places to hear brand-new music in a not-entirely-illegal context.
Billboard Hot 100 To Include Digital Streams [Billboard]
Comments
One little addition to my spiel above, which might make it less cryptic -- here's an excerpt from Geoff Mayfield's column for the magazine that isn't carried over in the online story linked above. He's explaining the other changes they're making to the Hot 100's sales-to-airplay formula as part of the digital-streams addition:
...[T]he growth of the [digital tracks] sector shifted the balance of radio audience points to sales from the chart's traditional 60-40 ratio to a sales tilt of as much as 70% in recent weeks.
To ensure chart continuity and minimize odd fluctuations, Billboard usually gave a slight edge to radio points in the [SoundScan] era, because sales volumes can hit peaks and valleys from week to week, while radio audience points remain constant through most weeks of a year.
Prior to the inclusion of digital sales, the early years of this decade saw the Hot 100 lean heavily toward radio points, as labels released fewer and fewer retail-available singles.
Starting next week, Billboard will divide a song's digital track and retail single sales by 10 on the Hot 100 rather than five....Even with that adjustment, one digital sale on the Hot 100 will carry the weight of 1,000 radio listeners.
I read this as Mayfield reassuring two audiences: consumers/chart fans, who like the idea of iTunes sales counting more than some Clear Channel program director's whims; and label execs, who want the chart to lean back toward airplay because it's a more relaiable barometer for them (and leads to album sales). But despite that last statement, there's no doubt that the wild-and-crazy years of songs shooting 30, 40, even 60 spots to #1 because of an iTunes release are (possibly) coming to an end.
The problem is that it was an emphasis on radio play that made the charts so stagnant over the last few years. Radio playlists change much more slowly than the public's taste, and since radio numbers are based on ratings that do an inaccurate job as far as how many people are actually paying attention to (or enjoying) what's being played, as a measure of popularity they're iffy at best. If downloading causes violent fluctuations in the charts, streaming is only going to increase that effect (which is probably why, as dennis said, Billboard is trying to have is both ways, adding streams but lessening the importance of digital). But I still believe that digital and sales numbers give a much more accurate view of what's popular right now than radio numbers. Sure they'll fluctuate, but in the end they'll provide a far more accurate, and therefore traceable, stream of data. If Billboard is toying with the numbers at the record companies' behest (an odd thing to do when you have a monopoly on the information), then they're just helping them maintain a status quo that is already killing album sales.
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