Editor's note: Wren Graves writes about trends in the entertainment industry and publishes a pop culture crossword puzzle every Tuesday in the Consequence Newsletter. This week, his analysis of the Billboard charts is also highlighted on our site. Sign up here to never miss an issue of the newsletter, and check out this week's crossword puzzle, “Wayne's World,” here.
For almost as long as Billboard has been publishing charts, artists and their managers have tried to make fun of them. You may have noticed this last annoying tactic, or maybe you've caught one annoying tactic (acoustic), one annoying tactic (speeded up), one annoying tactic (slowed down), and dozens of annoying tactics (alternating mixes). Artists are releasing the same song in alternate versions, in what is a rational (but still boring) reaction to Billboard's rules.
How do we get here? Finding out what's popular seems simple enough, but the people doing the counting have to make all kinds of decisions. Is watching a music video the same as paying money to download a song? Are ad-level streams as important as paying customers? And should different versions of the same track be counted as different songs?
In the case of the Billboard charts, the answer to all of these questions is “no,” and each “no” ensures that the most expensive consumption receives a greater proportion of the votes.
According to the New York Times, Billboard's album charts count a YouTube stream the same as a stream on Spotify or any other platform, depending on whether the listener paid for it on their own. 3,750 streams from free users are counted the same as 1,250 plays from paid accounts, which is equivalent to the purchase of a physical album.
As my colleague Jonah Krueger recently observed with the iTunes chart, charts encourage both die-hard fans and anyone with an ax to grind to purchase the same song multiple times. The more important it is to fans, the more they can pay, both to artists and intermediaries.
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