Chris Molanphy EMP Pop Con 2014 Portable Jukebox (25Apr14)
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ABSTRACT “Charting the Portable Jukebox: How Mobile Technologies Have Rewritten the Rules for Pop Music—And What Chart History Tells Us About the Future of How We Listen” When we talk about why songs are hits or why the industry chases certain sounds, we often frame the question in terms of musical trends at best, or base business interests at worst. But format and technology—more benign (even passive) cultural forces—have a greater impact on what becomes a hit than we often realize. It’s a technological tail wagging the cultural dog. Billboard’s Hot 100 formula has three major components: sales, airplay, and streaming. Each has been rocked by new mobile technology in the last decade, reshaping not just how we consume music but how artists and labels present it: Sales: The prime mover in song sales is iTunes, which now provides the industry with a greater proportion of its revenue than any single source. Features Apple dreamed up solely to improve its iTunes interface and lock in mobile consumers—including a la carte downloads and the “Complete My Album” feature—have scrambled label release strategies and led artists to rethink how their albums are received. Streaming: On-demand streams didn’t exist, in essence, until the last decade. But YouTube, fortified by the music-oriented Vevo, has supercharged the model. The advent of the smartphone has only multiplied views, making YouTube—more than Spotify—the Millennials’ portable jukebox. And with video views now counting for the Hot 100, artists have only grown more committed to musical (and visual) self-branding. Airplay: Finally, radio has been rocked by a mobile technology with far-reaching consequences—but it’s a technology experienced by only a few thousand of its consumers: the Portable People Meter. The wearable ratings-measuring device has improved audience measurement but also brutalized certain genres and formats. It may even be responsible for sustaining Top 40 radio’s surprising late-00s comeback. I’ll walk through all three legs of the Hot 100 stool and their technological changes; talk about what artists, songs and genres have been boosted on the charts by each mobile movement; and see whether past format-driven chart periods—the cassette era (1983–91) wrought by the Walkman and the CD era (1992–2003) fueled by the skip button—offer any guidance into what comes next.
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Chris Molanphy EMP Pop Con 2014 Portable Jukebox (25Apr14)
- 1. CHARTING THE PORTABLE JUKEBOX How technology and mobility have rewritten the rules for how popular music is consumed By Chris Molanphy Experience Music Project – EMP Pop Conference 2014 25 April 2014
- 2. Music and format: What defined the 1980s? Vinyl? Compact discs?
- 3. Cassettes: The unsexy format that defined the ’80s 1988: Cassettes peak at $6.1B – 59.1% of total US music shipments
- 5. Average no. of Top 10 hits per album, 5.4; average single peak, 3.23 Cassette era (1983–91): Every single a Top 10 hit 3 Top 10s (+1Airplay hit) Peaks: 1 • 1 • 8 (28A) Av. peak: 3 4 Top 10s (+1 R&B hit) Peaks: 3•1•1•1(10R) Av. peak: 2 4 Top 10s Peaks: 1 • 1 • 1 • 1 Av. peak: 1 7 Top 10s Peaks: 1 • 2 • 1 • 4 • 2 • 1 • 1 Av. peak: 2 7 Top 10s Peaks: 2 • 1 • 1 • 5 • 7 • 10 • 4 Av. peak: 4 7 Top 10s Peaks: 2 • 7 • 9 • 6 • 5 • 9 • 6 Av. peak: 6 6 Top 10s Peaks: 2 • 1 • 1 • 1 • 1 • 5 Av. peak: 3 5 Top 10s Peaks: 8 • 1 • 3 • 3 • 7 Av. peak: 4
- 6. Average no. of Top 10 hits per album, 2.6; average single peak, 8.37 CD era (1992–2003): one-fourth of singles miss the Top 10 entirely—and fewer hits per album 5 Top 10s (C) Peaks: 3 • 1 • 1 • 3 • 1 Av. peak: 2 (C) 3 Top 10s Peaks: 1 • 3 • 4 Av. peak: 3 2 Top 10s 13A•15A•65A•4•6•3A Av. peak: 5 (17) 3 Top 10s Peaks: 2 • 1 • 4 • 20 Av. peak: 7 3 Top 10s Peaks: 10 • 9 • 6 • 14 Av. peak: 10 1 Top 10 Peak: 1 Av. peak: 1 3 Top 10s Peaks: 1 • 1 • 3 • 76 Av. peak: 20 2 Top 10s Peaks: 6 • 25 • 6 • 30 Av. peak: 17 3 Top 10s Peaks: 4 • 1 • 5 Av. peak: 3 2 Top 10s Peaks: 2 • 4 • 15 • 14 Av. peak: 9 3 Top 10s Peaks:1•4•4•31 Av. peak: 10
- 7. The Billboard Hot 100 in the 21st century: Technology is the tail that wags the content dog Sales: Shift to digital reinvents the means to a hit single Airplay: How the Portable People Meter has changed radio’s metabolism Streaming: The YouTube effect and the accidental hit
- 8. The Billboard Hot 100 in the 21st century: Technology is the tail that wags the content dog Sales: Shift to digital reinvents the means to a hit single Airplay: How the Portable People Meter has changed radio’s metabolism Streaming: The YouTube effect and the accidental hit
- 9. Apple’s greatest music innovation/scourge: The unbundling of the album Billboard, 12 February 2005
- 10. The album cut: a relic of the pre-digital age Hot 100 peak: No. 3, 2005 First digital-era album cut– turned–hit Album cuts–turned–hits of the pre- digital era Hot 100 peak: No. 1 1980 Hot 100 peak: No. 1 2002 Hot 100 peak: No. 1 2001 Hot 100 peak: No. 1 1965
- 11. Focus-grouped chart-toppers of the iTunes era Third single from 21 No. 1, 2012 Third single from Prism No. 1, 2014
- 12. Apple 2007: year of iPhone, first iOS Music Store… and, more importantly, Complete My Album
- 13. Chart effects of Complete My Album: Why wait for album release date before fans sample? From Tha Carter III Nos. 1, 6, 10 All 2008 tracks released ahead of their respective albums From Paper Trail Nos. 1, 1 From I Am…Sasha Fierce Nos. 3, 1
- 14. Taylor Swift: queen of the digital sales model 5 prerelease singles ―Change‖ No. 10 ―Love Story‖ No. 4 ―Fearless‖ No. 9 ―You’re Not Sorry‖ No. 11 ―You Belong with Me‖ No. 2 4 prerelease singles ―Mine‖ No. 3 ―Speak Now‖ No. 8 ―Back to December‖ No. 6 ―Mean‖ No. 11 4 prerelease singles ―We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together‖ No. 1 ―Begin Again‖ No. 7 ―Red‖ No. 6 ―I Knew You Were Trouble‖No. 2 Debut week sales: 592,000 Debut week sales: 1,047,000 Debut week sales: 1,280,000 2008 2010 2012
- 15. The Billboard Hot 100 in the 21st century: Technology is the tail that wags the content dog Sales: Shift to digital reinvents the means to a hit single Airplay: How the Portable People Meter has changed radio’s metabolism Streaming: The YouTube effect and the accidental hit
- 16. PPM: ghastly gadget, radio ratings revolution
- 17. PPM loves ―turbo-pop‖; ballads are a challenge PPM-friendly turbo-pop/”surge” hits Ballad hits – had to get past radio’s PPM bias
- 18. The New Power Rotation: Spins of big hits doubled in a decade; one-week audience record has been reset 2013 One-week radio record set 228.9 million All-format audience impressions (week of 31 August 2013) 2005 One-week radio record set 212.2 million All-format audience impressions (week of 9 July 2005)
- 19. The Billboard Hot 100 in the 21st century: Technology is the tail that wags the content dog Sales: Shift to digital reinvents the means to a hit single Airplay: How the Portable People Meter has changed radio’s metabolism Streaming: The YouTube effect and the accidental hit
- 20. The Vevo–YouTube duopoly: The industry finally monetizes music videos
- 21. YouTube on the Hot 100: Good for memes, but are they ―hits‖?
- 22. The Miley model: Video titillation leads to radio dominance… July 2013 No. 2 September 2013 No. 1 First-week US video streams: 40 million
- 23. …plus an assist from a devoted fan December 2013 Returns to No. 1
- 24. YouTube 2014: Still generating random hits
- 25. Charts and technology: The big get bigger… Sales: Shift to digital has reinvented the means to a hit single Airplay: How the Portable People Meter has changed radio’s metabolism Streaming: The YouTube effect
- 26. …but left-field routes to success are still possible!
Editor's Notes
- When you think of the 1980s, what music format leaps to mind? I don’t mean the music itself—I mean, what music-carrying object were you caressing in the sanctity of your bedroom or den in 1983, 1985, 1987?
- Vinyl, perhaps? The early ’80s is all about vinyl for me. I recall hours spent poring over my Synchronicity, Sports, and Seven and the Ragged Tiger LPs, convinced that if I stared at Simon le Bon’s lyrics on that 12-by-12 sleeve, “Union of the Snake” might make sense.Or maybe the ’80s makes you think of the compact disc. We’ve all seen magazine nostalgia features that tie the decade in with the shiny discs. Developed at the end of the ’70s and launched commercially in 1982, the rainbow-hued, plastic-cased CD practically screams “Reagan era.”
- But we music fans know better—when it comes to hard numbers, the ’80s was the decade not of the LP or the CD but of the lowly cassette. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, it was in 1983—four years after the invention of the Sony Walkman—that the cassette pulled ahead of the LP as the top music-carrier unit. Tapes stayed ahead of the pack for nine years, all the way through 1991. At the peak in 1988, three out of every five albums sold in America were sold on cassette. What else can we say about cassettes? Well, they were durable, and ideally suited to cars. They were probably the all-time best format with which to make personal mixes for friends, as Rob Sheffield would attest. But when I think of cassettes and why I didn’t collect them for long, I remember one thing: rewinding and fast-forwarding. It was maddening on a home-stereo if you wanted to skip a song, and it was murder on Walkman batteries. Does this sound petty? The music business didn’t think so—the industry spent the decade of the cassette milking every hit album for as many radio singles as possible, ensuring you wouldn’t have to hold down that button long before landing on a hit.
- The numbers bear this out—take a look at this quick calculation I’ve done on the hit-single percentages on each year’s top Billboard album during the “cassette era,” 1983 to 1991. (That’s nine years, inclusive, but there’s only eight albums here because Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the No. 1 album of both 1983 and 1984.)Anyway, these smash albums…wait…
- These smash tapes contained a staggering number of hits.[Click again]Literally every single released from them was a Top 10 hit, and just under half were No. 1s. (I’m not counting Bon Jovi’s “Never Say Goodbye,” which wasn’t issued as a single in America and peaked on the airplay-only chart at No. 28; there was also a Whitney Houston single that only charted R&B, but it did make the Top 10 there.) The takeaway? During the period where music consumption was dominated by a medium that was a pain to skip around, the recording industry made it so that you didn’t have to jump around much. I’m not seriously suggesting that the rapacious music business wanted to give you more value for your money; just that, if they turned as many songs as possible into radio fodder, you’d be more likely to drop a Hamilton on a tape—think of such unlikely, late-album-cycle hits as George Michael’s “Kissing a Fool” or Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat.” You may be thinking, “Well, yes—but a hit album is a hit album; don’t all best-selling albums contain a pile of hit singles?” Yes, but the pile of hits is a bit smaller in the CD era—let’s look at those for comparison.
- I’m designating the “CD era” as lasting from 1992, when discs overtook tapes as America’s top format, through 2003, the year Apple introduced the iTunes Store. Mind you, the CD continued to be America’s top album medium for the rest of the aughts and still is today, but we need to stop somewhere, and albums in general have sold so poorly in the digital era that this 12-year timespan seems appropriate. (I’m skipping 2001, because its top-selling album was the Beatles’ 1, made up entirely of presold material; so it doesn’t count for our purposes.) Anyway, looking at this period, dominated by the 1990s, we see fewer singles and lower-charting hits in general—to be exact, there were half as many Top 10 hits per No. 1 album. Garth Brooks kicked off the CD era with a bang—his hits didn’t chart on the Hot 100, but he did score three No. 1 Country hits—five Top 10s, total. But the hit ratio starts to drop off around the time of Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View; none of its singles even made the Top Five, and only three made the Top 10—but what did CD buyers of 1995 care as long as their CD players could skip directly to “Only Wanna Be with You”? By the time we get to the Titanic soundtrack in 1998, there’s only one single released, period, albeit a big one. (I’ll spare you the mention of its name, lest it infect your brain for the rest of the day.) And the hit-single dropoff persisted into the 2000s. The takeaway here—which will seem intuitive to anyone who remembers the 1990s—is that the labels realized a CD could effectively behave like an $18 single. Fans would skip and skip and skip to their favorite song, and it wasn’t necessary to expend promotional funds on more than a couple of actual hits. (And by the way, these are the top-selling CDs, which at least had more than one hit each. I’m not even discussing the ’90s’ many single-hit discs; I discussed the 1990s “War Against the Single” in my EMP paper at UCLA in 2011.)
- All this is a preamble to my larger point, which is apropos for a Pop Conference themed around mobility: When we talk about why songs are hits or why the industry chases certain sounds, we often frame the question in terms of musical trends at best, or base business interests at worst. But format and technology—more benign (even passive) cultural forces—have a greater impact on what becomes a hit than we often realize. It’s a technological tail wagging the cultural dog. I’ll focus the rest of my talk today on the last 10 years on the pop charts. Specifically the Hot 100 song chart, because that’s where much of the action is these days—again, album sales are off massively in the digital era. Moreover, the Hot 100, more than the album chart, has always been about tracking, if you will, the portable—from 45-RPM records to transistor radios. Since its inception more than 55 years ago, the Hot 100 has been a hybrid chart, smashing together multiple pools of data to determine the biggest hits in the USA. The current hybrid is essentially a three-legged stool comprising—in order of influence—song sales, radio airplay, and online streaming. What I want to talk about today is how each leg of the Hot 100 stool has been reimagined (or, in the case of streaming, built from scratch) around a digital consumption model. And, in turn, how each major technology by which we consume music has redirected, not just how the music is released, but what we consider a hit.
- Let’s start with the most obvious, sales of songs—a form of consumption that flipped entirely to an all-digital model between the 1990s and the 2000s.
- While the invention of the MP3 in the mid-’90s, the release of Napster in 1999, and the aforementioned launch of the iTunes Store in 2003 were all pivotal in the popularization of digital music, the digital era on the charts didn’t begin in earnest until 2005, when Billboard added digital song data to the Hot 100.In the nine years since that change, the recording industry has adjusted its release strategies to account for Apple’s technologies. The most obvious disruption to the industry’s longtime business model was the so-called unbundling of the album—Apple’s insistence that virtually all album cuts be available at a per-song price. This iTunes feature dates back to the Store’s inception in 2003, but the addition of iTunes sales to Billboard’s charts in 2005 magnified the effects.Within the first year of digital sales being added to the Hot 100, Interscope Records was compelled to choose a different single from a high-priority album largely because of heavy downloading on iTunes—a novelty song the label had intended to leave as an album cut until digital sales prompted radio to start spinning it ahead of schedule.
- The song? The Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” which ultimately spent a month and a half in the Top Three. (Again, I apologize.) Nearly a decade later, the labels are still using the unbundling of the album to their advantage when choosing which album cuts to promote. Indeed, in the digital era, the very term “album cut” feels like a relic—if every track behaves on iTunes like a single, then the only question is which one the label chooses to promote. [Click again]Of course, the album cut that becomes a chart-climbing smash is an old, old story that long predates digital music. Songs as varied as Herman’s Hermits’ “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” and Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma” were turned from album cuts into No. 1 hits by enterprising deejays and vigilant fans. But labels no longer have to rely on buzz or their guts when choosing singles—they now have hard data.
- In late 2011, Sony Music used iTunes to, in effect, focus-group a No. 1 hit: They selected Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain” as the third U.S. single from her smash 21 album after it sold three quarters of a million copies as an album cut. This data-mining of hits persists right up to this year. At the start of 2014, after a midtempo Katy Perry single underperformed on the charts, Capitol Records righted the ship by choosing Perry’s next single based on digital sales and fan sharing. The winning song, “Dark Horse,” was not an obvious choice for a single at first, but again, it wound up a No. 1 Hot 100 hit and is still in the Top Five at this writing. The unbundling of the album is the most profound phenomenon in music sales in the digital era. But over the last decade, even marginal changes in digital functionality have had powerful chart effects.
- Let’s step back to 2007. It was a busy year for Apple—they introduced the iPhone, probably the most celebrated product introduction of the 21st century. Later that year, the company introduced its first mobile store; though we forget this now, Apple did not sanction apps until 2008, and so the first store on the company’s iPhones and iPod Touches only sold music. To be sure, this was a shot in the arm to the music business. But in between these two announcements, in March 2007, an even quieter Apple feature launch would affect the pop charts more profoundly: an iTunes button called Complete My Album. The Complete My Album button allowed iTunes customers who’d purchased up to three songs from an album to get a corresponding discount if they later decided to purchase the whole bundle—say, 99 cents off if you’d purchased one song, $1.98 if you’d bought two. Prior to Complete My Album, labels had been fearful of releasing digital singles ahead of albums. In 2006, for example, Ne-Yo’s hit ballad “So Sick” was rising on the Hot 100 for weeks as a radio cut, but Def Jam held it back from iTunes until the week Ne-Yo’s full album dropped; only then did the song rise to No. 1. Complete My Album was probably the best thing Apple had done for the music industry since the iTunes Store launched four years earlier. The label bosses had been cursing Steve Jobs’s name ever since he Jedi-mind-tricked them into signing away their content for a buck a song in 2003; now, at least, Jobs and his minions were going to help them sell more albums—the labels could push a hit single and, later, entice customers to upgrade. Sure enough, digital albums began selling better by decade’s end, and the Complete My Album button had something to do with that. But with physical sales of CDs still sliding, on the whole the album format wasn’t doing noticeably better in the late aughts.
- The really interesting effects of Complete My Album, however, were over on the Hot 100. For the labels, there was now no downside to making a leadoff single available. Or two singles. Or three. Indeed, they could release half an album ahead of schedule, piece by piece, and let rabid fans click “buy” to their hearts’ content, confident that a large percentage would come back for the bundle. By 2008, less than a year after Complete My Album launched, the labels had reworked their single release strategies around the feature. That year’s top-selling album, Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III, was preceded by three pre-album digital singles: “Lollipop,” “A Milli” and “Got Money.” All of them were Top 10 hits, and the album still went on to sell 3 million. Later that year, T.I. and Beyoncé did even better, dropping two prerelease singles each from their respective albums Paper Trail and I Am…Sasha Fierce, and getting rewarded with two simultaneous Top Five hits apiece; at one point in December, these four singles blockaded the Hot 100’s Top Four.
- But no artist has better used the digital model to her advantage than Taylor Swift. Beginning with her second album Fearless, Swift has preceded the release of her albums with as many as four or five digital singles in a short burst—usually one a week for a couple of months. All have charted high on the Hot 100: most of them spent at least a week in the Hot 100’s Top 10 and a couple just missed. Not all were tracks that Swift’s label, Big Machine, expected to push to radio later, but again, as with Adele or Katy Perry, the label were getting a live market test with few downsides. “You Belong with Me,” one of Swift’s biggest hits ever when it finally went to radio in 2009, began its life in 2008 as a prerelease teaser track.When Swift’s albums finally drop, any deep cuts that weren’t already issued as prerelease singles also make Hot 100 appearances. [Click again]And here’s the kicker—all this singles activity doesn’t hurt Swift’s album sales at all. Her last three albums have all debuted at No. 1 with blockbuster numbers—the last two with extraordinarily rare million-copy sales debuts. For artists like Swift or Justin Bieber, who also leads into his album releases with prerelease breadcrumb trails of hit singles, the parade of hits is an event unto itself; not unlike the Netflix model of dropping all episodes of a new TV series at once, the issuance of a fusillade of hitbound songs in rapid succession is the event.
- So that’s how one mobile-fueled millennial technology has rewired the charts. How about a technology that’s a century old?When it comes to radio and mobility, the action isn’t in how the consumer tunes in. AM/FM radio has worked the same for generations, and amazingly, even in 2014, good old terrestrial radio still beats satellite radio and radio-like digital services such as Pandora by a country mile. No, the millennial mobile technology that’s changed radio is a little gadget that measures how folks listen: the Portable People Meter.
- What is PPM? It’s a device sent by Arbitron, the radio-ratings people, to participants who are paid to wear it on their person throughout the day. It picks up electronically encoded signals from radio stations, regardless of where they're heard; any station picked up by the PPM gets credit, even if the person wearing the meter didn’t choose to hear it.As you can see, it’s not going to be mistaken for a hip gadget—pagers in the ’90s were cooler-looking than this thing; reportedly, Arbitron even had to redesign it recently just to get teenagers to be willing to wear it, even when they’re being paid. But after decades of Arbitron measuring radio listenership with a diary system that asked participants to manually record the stations they heard throughout the day, this hideous device now provides radio with a massive improvement in ratings measurement. It tracks what radio average Americans are hearing throughout the day—and, crucially, what makes us flip the station. That obsession over station-flipping has been the subject of reams of writing and discussion in the radio industry that I don't have time to get into today—articles breaking down the so-called “rules” of PPM. Many of these rules have to do with everything but the music: for example, a debate over whether fewer but longer ad breaks per hour are more effective; advice that DJs not talk more than is absolutely necessary or even verbalize that an ad break is about to start.
- When it comes to the music, however, the news is as depressing as you might suspect: PPM reveals that folks like the familiar, and they tune out when they hear something too new. PPM has had brutal impacts on certain formats that once played more new music, especially black radio—a phenomenon I discussed in my recent feature for Pitchfork on the bastardization of Billboard’s R&B chart. For a while, there was even evidence that tempo mattered. If you’ve wondered why the dance-pop trend that kicked off with Lady Gaga in 2009 and morphed into the EDM-pop trend of the past few years shows no sign of letting up, PPM is a major culprit. Radio guru Sean Ross of Edison Research even coined a term in Billboard, “turbo-pop,” for the kind of music that seems to keep listeners glued to Top 40 radio. He also coined a term for the structure of pop song that works best at retaining listeners, which he dubbed “the surge” (picture the electro-pop hits of producers like Swedish House Mafia’s “Don’t You Worry Child” or David Guetta’s “Titanium”). Until a couple of years ago, it was thought that ballads of any variety were anathema in the era of PPM. That is, until late 2011, when Adele scored a blockbuster hit with the piano-and-vocal-only “Someone Like You,” which improbably topped radio playlists. Within a year, timid radio stations had reinstated their ballad slot on the playlist, and Bruno Mars and Rihanna scored hits with the starkest ballads of their careers. Mind you, Top 40 radio is still selective about the slow songs it will play—but once a track like Passenger’s “Let Her Go” or A Great Big World’s “Say Something” prove PPM-proof, they get power-rotated like any track.
- About that: One of the most revealing details PPM has uncovered is that the typical radio listener is only tuned in for about 10 minutes. This means that programmers have to, in essence, “brand” their stations within a shorter burst of time spent listening, or TSL in radio parlance. This means that if a song is a hit and it’s a core playlist track for your station, you’re playing it. A lot. Early this year, a Wall Street Journal reporter put hard numbers around this, revealing that the top 10 radio songs in 2013, according to radio conglomerate Clear Channel, were played almost twice as much on the radio as the top 10 of 2003. The most-played song last year, Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," aired some 750,000 times in 180 markets, or more than 2,000 times per day; the top song in 2003, “When I'm Gone” by 3 Doors Down, was played under 450,000 times that year. According to Billboard, “Blurred Lines” also set a radio record one week last July, generating 229 million “listener impressions” in a single week; that beat Mariah Carey’s summer 2005 record-holder “We Belong Together” by more than 17 million. We might well see another such record set before 2014 is out; we already came close this month. The Hot 100’s current No. 1 song, Pharrell’s “Happy,” clocked 226 million impressions just three weeks ago, missing Robin Thicke’s record by 3 million.
- So, just as with the labels adjusted to digital sales, radio programmers have adjusted, egregiously, to the Portable People Meter.What about streaming, the last leg of the three-legged Hot 100 stool?I don’t need to remind anyone here that YouTube is, for many young people, now the ultimate jukebox. For all the press Spotify and Pandora receive among streaming services, ol’ YouTube still outdraws both just in the music category, and that’s even before Google launches its planned all-music YouTube service.
- The industry figured out YouTube’s potential years ago—the industry’s Vevo music-video channel has had a carriage agreement with YouTube since its inception five years ago, and a share of advertising revenue on music videos flows directly into the labels’ coffers. Essentially, the Vevo–YouTube duopoly has monetized music videos directly, essentially for the first time in the recording industry’s history; in the heyday of MTV, the industry gave away videos for free. Now, with music sales sliding, YouTube is quietly emerging as a serious source of profit, and it’s only getting larger.
- That’s great for the industry’s bottom line, but I’d like to talk briefly about how YouTube has redefined our perception of what a hit is. As Jody Rosen and I reported in Slate early last year, YouTube was baked into the Hot 100 only 14 months ago. I spent a great deal of my year as a chart analyst discussing how YouTube had changed the Hot 100 (or, to some observers, wrecking it).Billboard's new rule not only counts views of official music videos toward the Hot 100 but also any fan-created video that uses a chunk of the original song. As such, videos with strong meme potential have a leg up. To this day, the biggest beneficiary of Billboard’s YouTube rule is still the guy who went to No. 1 the week Billboard instituted it last February: trap-music producer Baauer, with “Harlem Shake.”More than a year later, it’s valid to ask: What was “Harlem Shake”? Was it a hit song, or a hit meme? The fan-video rule worked like gangbusters for "Shake," which benefited from the awkwardly postmodern and deracinated meme in which gangs of costumed people pelvic-thrusted to the song. The numbers Baauer's ditty was racking up last winter made its vault to the penthouse an inevitability. The week it reached No. 1, "Shake" was heard in YouTube videos more than 100 million times. No other hit video in 2013 — not even Ylvis's viral trifle "The Fox" (which reached No. 6 in October) — had even half that many streams in a single week.
- Besides Baauer, no one in 2013 rode the YouTube train to success further than Miley Cyrus, whose two major 2013 hits were both fueled by lurid videos. "We Can't Stop" was already a growing radio hit when its tripped-out, twerky video rocket-fueled the song to No. 2 last July. For her follow-up, the torch ballad "Wrecking Ball,” Cyrus got even nakeder. And thanks to nearly 40 million YouTube views in its first week, the song shot to the top of the Hot 100 in September before it had even become a Top 30 radio hit. "Wrecking Ball" eventually became a major airplay hit, and truth be told, it's a well-constructed pop ballad.
- But it became even harder to defend the song as a hit on its own merits when, in December, it returned to No. 1—two months after it left—fueled by a new wave of viral YouTube-watching. This time, fans weren't clicking on Cyrus's own official, lewd video; they were watching coquettish Chatroulette user Stephen Kardynal'suproarious video lampoon of the song. Again, it's valid to ask: Is a song that spent all three of its weeks at No. 1 thanks largely to titillated YouTube views an actual hit? To me, the success of Kardynal's video actually strengthens the argument that "Wrecking Ball" was a for-real hit—if only because most of Kardynal's fellow-chatters are singing melodramatically to the ballad, and they know every word. It's the MTV Era all over again, now made more participatory—like we've all been invited into the hormonal fishbowl of Total Request Live.
- Four months into 2014, YouTube is still generating random, left-field hits fueled by visuals more than sonics. In March, the viral video “First Kiss” generated a short-lived Top 10 hit. You may remember this viral video, which was actually an ad campaign, from your social media feed—a bunch of pretty people who’ve never met before make out before a camera. The song playing behind the kiss montage—“We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow” by French singer/actress Soko—spent one week on the Hot 100, all the way up at No. 9, thanks almost entirely to the 11.5 million streams the “First Kiss” video generated in a single week. On the one hand, it’s frustrating for chart fans to see Billboard’s flagship chart pockmarked by hits that the average American couldn’t name or sing at gunpoint. On the other hand, in the week the video racked up all those views, Soko’s track also rang up 10,000 in digital sales—people paying actual money to own the song. It’s a little hard to begrudge artists pursuing any means at their disposal in scoring a hit and generating revenue in this bizarre new digital economy.
- What should we conclude from all this upheaval regarding technology and pop music? As ever in the music business—just as screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood—“Nobody knows anything.” The industry is a slow study in macro trends but a quick study in micro trends: They couldn’t see the phenomenon of digital music coming in the late ’90s, but they figured out how to use Complete My Album to their chart advantage within a year—just like they figured out how to commercially maximize the cassette in the ’80s and the CD in the ’90s. What’s also somewhat depressing about the one-two punch of digital music and PPM-driven radio is it entrenches what’s already a hit. At this point, it’s a little hard to root for Taylor Swift to score 12 more Hot 100 hits off her next album. And as much as I like Pharrell’s “Happy,” I don’t think we need another week of 200 million PPM-friendly radio gross impressions. Even Spotify, which I haven’t talked about today but has been baked into the Hot 100 since 2012, hasn’t done much to shake up the Top 40, since a Katy Perry song that’s selling well and blanketing the radio is also getting played on streaming services like mad.For me as a chart-watcher, though, YouTube gives me a perverse sort of hope. No, I don’t particularly like that “Harlem Shake” topped the Hot 100 based on a meme. But what’s great about YouTube as a chart element is, it hasn’t been fully decoded yet—no one’s fully figured out how to make a surefire hit with it. Nudity works, but only to a point; memes work, but they’re hard to generate organically. A world where a Norwegian pop song about foxes, or a tiny indie-pop record like Soko’s, can infiltrate the Top 10 is one of whimsy and chance.
- Somewhere in America, right now, someone is doing Samuel Herring’s David Letterman dance in her bedroom, with Future Islands’ song “Seasons” playing in the background, and she’s getting ready to upload it to YouTube. Maybe that video—not David Letterman, not a radio program director, not payola—is what will ultimately makes Samuel Herring an actual pop star. Do your worst, interwebs. Thank you.