A few weeks ago, Pitchfork ran “I Know You Got Soul,” a sharp and deeply researched piece by the critic and pop-chart analyst Chris Molanphy about the Billboard Hot R. & B./Hip-Hop chart. He writes, “Billboard has had a chart to track music aimed at African-Americans since the 1940s, but its size and methodology have changed multiple times over the years. To say nothing of its name—beginning with Harlem Hit Parade in 1942, the chart has been called everything from Race Records (1945-49) to Hot Soul Singles (1973-82).”
The essay goes into great detail about a process that only seems simple from a distance—figuring out what defines an R. & B. record, and then determining who is listening to it. Since incorporating sales figures from SoundScan and adding the activity of streaming services like Spotify and YouTube (also a streaming service, whether or not it brands itself as one), Billboard likely has the most accurate data it’s ever had. That doesn’t make the task of breaking out self-identifying fans and their favorite songs any easier. A human still needs to decide which numbers say what, and, in 2014, the Hot R. & B./Hip-Hop chart is looking especially odd.
Molanphy unpacks why, in the current version of a chart that’s been revised many times in its history, white artists like Macklemore and Eminem seem to be overrepresented. (Billboard hasn’t used the term “race records” in almost sixty years, but that uncomfortable term lies beneath the discussion, like railroad ties buried on the beach.) Does one listener’s play count more than another’s? How do you move from a raw, all-in count to a subtler, openly ideological tally?
We’re used to seeing data collected and used to predict weather and render census figures, but it is increasingly common to see data approached as if it were more perceptive about people than, you know, people. Data by itself apparently can, with brief contextualization, sell products and report the news. Over the past week, Molanphy and I discussed the logistical and political problems Billboard faces when playing with numbers. An edited version of that conversation follows.
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.
As we move away from terrestrial radio stations with very specific themes—hot R. & B. and hip-hop, hot modern rock, hot bags of songs with singing—to self-defining online stations that mimic radio using various algorithms, the data is becoming more bountiful (thanks, computerized life!), but also more chaotic. The cohort is being defined from all sides, none of them in sync. How is Billboard going to track all of this?
I often have to defend Billboard in writing about their charts. The very first comment I get on almost everything article I publish is, “Why are we even talking about this? The Billboard charts are bullshit, they’re bought and sold, they measure nothing.”
My counterargument is usually something along the lines of, “The more data we have, the more credible these charts are going to be.” You can quibble with the one retailer that got bought off by somebody, or you can quibble with Clear Channel being pressured into playing this record more. But (a) Clear Channel actually has to play the record now for it to get measured by Billboard and (b) the play by Clear Channel is going to be counteracted by literally millions of people clicking on the video on YouTube (or not), by hundreds of thousands of people buying it on iTunes (or not).
The days prior to the launch of SoundScan, in 1991—of the labels really buying a hit record lock, stock, and barrel—while not entirely gone, are mostly gone, because it’s just too damned hard to buy off that much data. It is now more difficult than ever for corruption to make the charts irrelevant, or useless, or a measurement of nothing. Even before 1991—if you went back to the summer of 1983 and asked me, “What’s playing everywhere?” I’d say “Billie Jean” and “Every Breath You Take,” and sure enough, those were the two biggest No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. So it wasn’t like the Hot 100 measured nothing back then. But now, even more so, the more data you pour into this chart, the more useful and the more accurate it actually is.
The problem with the genre charts is different: we don’t just need more data; we need better data. The ghastly discovery that fans of these genres made after Billboard changed their genre methodology in 2012 is that Billboard is taking the exact same massive pools of data they use for the Hot 100, which is all genres, and just cutting it down to the songs that it thinks qualifies.
To be fair to Billboard, I’m sure that when they decide that “TKO” by Justin Timberlake is an R. & B. song but “Treasure” by Bruno Mars is not, they’re taking their cues from the fact that R. & B. radio is playing one and not the other. But once they’ve made that call, they’re piling in all of the sales of the Justin Timberlake song into an R. & B. chart, which is fundamentally unhelpful. If I’m looking at an R. & B. chart, I don’t want to know that, one week, a hundred and fifty thousand people nationwide bought the Justin Timberlake track, and while they were at it, they also bought something by Britney Spears. I want to know, did the person who bought a Kendrick Lamar track also buy the Justin Timberlake track? That’s interesting to me. That’s telling that there is genre commonality there.
But aren’t there Britney tracks that are more relevant to the R. & B. audience than one of Lamar’s weirder tracks? Isn’t that part of the problem here? If any of this is determined solely by race, things get ugly fast.
Right, and I would never want it to be about race alone. Again, there’s precious little argument about the center of R. & B. and hip-hop. We can all agree Britney isn’t at the center; Kendrick is. But then, to your point, once you have a good working definition of the center of the genre and of the audience—regardless of ethnicity—that listens to that genre, then you can start slicing and dicing the occasional Britney track that the R. & B. audience likes, and the occasional Kendrick track that they don’t.
My main point is simply this: for a genre chart to be credible, it needs a different pool of data. It needs to be large enough to be meaningful. You don’t want to narrow the data so finely that it can be swayed by just a handful of people, because then you get into the bought-off situation that we remember from the pre-SoundScan charts. But you do want it limited enough so it’s not just trolling for any sentient being in America who might, one day out of the year, buy a Macklemore song. I do want that person’s purchase of a Macklemore song tracked, and reflected on the Hot 100. I don’t want it reflected on the R. & B. chart if this is the only R. & B. track he or she is buying all year.
That’s the challenge for Billboard. I’m a longtime Billboard-chart fan, and I absolutely ascribe the best motives to them&. The data problems are by and large not of their making. It’s not their fault that everybody goes to the same sites to purchase and stream music. But it seems to me that, if Billboard wants its genre charts to continue to be credible, it is fundamentally a mistake for them to be miniature versions of the Hot 100.
Talk to me about your proposed solution for the cohort problem. I don’t know that I trust streaming—those numbers are so small, especially if you cut them down to just a few lovers of R. & B. and hip-hop in every city.
For the genre charts, the thing that I’m looking for is a digital equivalent of what Billboard used to call a “core R. & B. store”: a place that primarily sold R. & B. and hip-hop. Maybe it sold the occasional rock record, but fundamentally its stock in trade was black music. So now, in the digital era, we’ve reached a point where the cohort—to use your term—is not organized by the stores they visit but rather by the Web sites they visit or the types of music they listen to, and you have to find a way to recreate the core-R.-&-B.-store model in the digital age. And probably the only way to do that is by creating what I call a pool of R. & B. or hip-hop “super users”: basically users who listen to all sorts of stuff, but the center of what they listen to is R. & B. and hip-hop. And then you track what this pool of users is consuming.
To your point, that’s not going to be terribly useful as long as the numbers are in the hundreds, right? But, the minute you get numbers that are in the hundreds of thousands, that starts to become meaningful. Right now, the No. 1 song on the Hot 100 any given week sells as few as two hundred thousand copies—at most maybe four or five hundred thousand copies. There’s never been a digital song that’s sold more than six hundred thousand and change copies in a week. So if you get a pool of users that numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, that’s statistically meaningful for Billboard. Then, conceivably, you could recreate the core-R.-&-B.-store model by aggregating R. & B. and hip-hop super-consumers.
The beauty of a system like that is, once again, you’re defining this cohort by the center of the genre, not the edges. So if a core R. & B. and hip-hop listener—that user who normally listens to Kendrick Lamar—one day decides, “This Lorde record is cool to me—I’m going to stream that twelve times this week,” that’s worthy of the chart. Now what you’re tracking, finally, is crossover, which is the whole point of this exercise. You’re tracking both songs that start in a genre and eventually move outward to pop, and songs that start pop and later get adopted by genre fans. That’s been interesting for the past fifty years.
If we weight streaming data too heavily, we fall over. There is still a digital divide and there are still people who listen to music in ways that don’t involve the Internet.
Clearly, there’s a digital divide issue, especially when it comes to R. & B. and hip-hop on streaming services. But it’s like every other technology we’ve seen, like the iPod: it was overwhelmingly consumed by white thirty-two-year-olds in 2001, 2002, 2003, then eventually it was disseminated to pretty much everybody. Apple started in the early aughts with a four-hundred-dollar iPod. And then, by 2007, the biggest-selling track on iTunes was “Crank That” by Soulja Boy. So it’s not impossible to imagine that these demographics shift, and eventually a wider array of demographics, regardless of socioeconomic status, are adopting these technologies. We may not be there yet, but I can’t see how a technology that shovels a lot of content at you, for free, couldn’t be adopted by more teen-agers as time goes on.
Speaking of how teens listen, YouTube is the biggest streaming service, used much more widely than Spotify or any of its equivalents. How does Billboard handle YouTube plays?
YouTube plays were added to the Hot 100 in February of last year. I’ve been reporting about this endlessly because it’s been the elephant in the room for the last year on the charts, and there’s a lot of Sturm und Drang over whether YouTube is a benign influence or a ridiculous influence on the Hot 100. I was very much in favor of adding YouTube to the Hot 100, but it hasn’t been perfect. The very first No. 1 hit caused by YouTube was “Harlem Shake” by Baauer, which was certainly the biggest meme in the U.S., but I’m not entirely sure it was the biggest song. So that’s a bit of a definitional problem.
That change is why “Gangnam Style” went to No. 1, right?
It didn’t, actually: it went to No. 2. You can view the YouTube rule as the “PSY was robbed” rule, because PSY’s hit peaked in the fall of 2012, before there was a YouTube rule. He peaked at No. 2 behind a Maroon 5 song nobody remembers as well as they remember “Gangnam Style.” Basically, if YouTube had been baked into the Hot 100 back then, PSY would have gotten his No. 1 hit. Whether you love or despise “Gangnam Style,” I think everybody can agree there was a moment where it was the biggest song in America. It was ridiculous that it wasn’t No. 1 on the charts.
Billboard, in essence, agreed, and eventually added YouTube to the charts, when they felt like they had the data right. Since then, it’s had a huge influence on the Hot 100. I mean, those guys from Norway, Ylvis, got a Top 10 hit with “The Fox” almost entirely because of YouTube. Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” hit No. 1 twice, and both times YouTube was the biggest factor. So, I agree, you can’t build any major Billboard chart that doesn’t include YouTube; it would be preposterous at this point.
By the way, YouTube is in the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart’s formula right now. Billboard added it last year, same as in the Hot 100. But that data pool has the same problem as everything else I talk about in the article: they’re basically including everybody. There’s a layer of complexity you’d have to add if you were going to make YouTube data credible for this chart. You’d have to say, “Are you an R. & B. and hip-hop super-user? Week after week, are you mostly watching J. Cole and The-Dream videos? You are? O.K., then we’re going to count your view of this video for the R. & B./Hip-Hop chart.” But, for Billboard, that’s a layer of complexity that is probably further than they want to travel, or it may not be possible right now.
So YouTube hasn’t addressed the imbalances in the chart. Why do you think it’s so hard for the pop and R. & B. categories to fall back into some sort of accurate shape?
I wrote a piece for Slate back in December that seems relevant here. A couple of weeks before the end of the year, I noticed there had not been a single No. 1 record on the Hot 100 by a black person; 2013 was the first time that had happened. In the article, I alluded to the idea that we’re in a so-called “post-racial,” Obama-era America. There’s this sense that we, as Americans and as music fans, want to move beyond this and pretend that these genres don’t exist and good music is good music.
That’s bullshit. Even if the definitions of these genres are harder to define than they were fifteen or twenty years ago, they’re still subcultures from which interesting music emerges and bubbles up, and also still subcultures where stuff from the top pushes down. I was careful in the piece not to merely talk about R. & B. music like it’s this farm team for big pop records that white people can consume. I’ve always been equally charmed by the R. & B. record that starts on the R. & B. chart and migrates to the Hot 100 and, say, a Hall and Oates record that starts pop but migrates back to the R. & B. chart. The way the R. & B. audience selectively decides, “We’re not interested in these five Hall and Oates tracks, but ‘I Can’t Go for That’? We’re very interested in that track.”
That, to me, is culturally meaningful. And it would be a shame if, in this supposedly post-racial America—which everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Charles Blow have all poked holes in—we lost these cultures and these cohorts, because they’re still interesting and useful.
Photograph by Mark Metcalfe/Getty.
