The Joys of Streaming

More big changes a-coming:

UK singles chart to include music videos for the first time

on Friday, when the Official Charts Company overhauls its rules to include music video streams and downloads for the first time.
Unofficial videos and user-generated content featuring music will not count - but official videos played on YouTube, Apple, Tidal and Spotify in the UK will.

Oh dear 

Superstars Are Hogging Billboard’s Hot 100
Big names like Drake and Taylor Swift dominate with multiple hits, meaning fewer artists make the list

By one measure, the Billboard Hot 100 sizzles a little less than it once did.

The music chart, published weekly by Billboard magazine since 1958, ranks songs based on sales, radio play and, these days, online streaming.

But it’s now dominated by big names in a way that it wasn’t in years past. Today, it’s not uncommon for the most popular performers to have 10 or more songs listed on the Hot 100 at one time.

Supernovas like Drake, Post Malone and The Weeknd are burning brighter than ever. But as a consequence, fewer leading artists get to see their names on the chart.

Today, the Hot 100 typically features around 75 different lead artists—the performers whose names appear first on a song. In the 1970s, the number was closer to 100.

At the same time, the hits now include far more cameos by featured performers. Until the mid-1990s, the number hovered around 10. Today, it’s closer to 45.

“Drake is representative of the new consolidation,” according to Henry Hinnefeld, a data scientist at Civis Analytics, who analyzed the charts. “He accounts for six of the 10 best weeks in terms of number of songs in the Hot 100.”

In mid-July, all 25 cuts from Drake’s album “Scorpion” simultaneously made the chart. The Canadian singer and rapper also performed on two other songs for a record-breaking 27 Hot 100 hits in a single week.

You might wonder whose score he topped. It was his own. Last year, he had 24 songs on the list in one week.

For decades, the Beatles held the record with 14 simultaneous hits, an achievement that now ranks 17th behind Drake and others.

“When you put it in those terms, you know it’s really big,” said Gary Trust, Billboard’s director of charts. “When you’re bigger than the Beatles, you know you’re doing pretty well.”

Some people find it problematic to compare the Hot 100 over time because what it measures has changed, most recently to account for streaming.

“You can instantaneously put up songs on the internet, so the time lag between doing something and having visibility is zero,” said Eric Weisbard, author of “Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music.”

The consulting company Media Insights & Decisions in Action has argued that what it calls a “superstar artist economy” has evolved, ironically, because the overwhelming size of the digital music catalog has confused fans.

“There is so much choice that there is effectively no choice at all,” the company reported in 2014, concluding that rather than broadening their tastes, the “tyranny of choice” has led consumers to retreat to familiar and easy to find music.

Beverly Keel, chair of Middle Tennessee State University’s Department of Recording Industry, agrees.

“It’s harder to break artists now,” she said. “That is maybe something that is surprising given the internet.”

Another outcome is that today’s raft of collaborations has created a network of artistic connections that runs through the chart like never before (at least based on credited work; more on that in a minute).

“The fraction of the artists in a given week’s Hot 100 who could be joined together by ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’-style chains of shared song credits has increased dramatically,” Dr. Hinnefeld said.

Through the mid-1990s, fewer than 5% of artists were connected. Now, the portion sometimes exceeds 35%.

Kanye West and Taylor Swift have one degree of Hot 100 separation, according to Dr. Hinnefeld’s measure: They both have had hits with the singer and rapper Future.

Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson have six degrees of Hot 100 separation: In a series of songs that all landed on the singles chart, Snoop performed with Kendrick Lamar; Mr. Lamar performed with Taylor Swift; Ms. Swift performed with Tim McGraw; Mr. McGraw performed with Kenny Chesney; Mr. Chesney performed with Jimmy Buffett and Toby Keith; and Mr. Keith performed with Willie Nelson.

The musical unions have not escaped Billboard’s notice.

“Ever since turn of the century, it’s so common, we almost notice it more if there’s a hit without someone on it,” Mr. Trust said, a trend he attributes to the rise of hip hop. “It’s just the way the genre works.”

But he also pointed out that in the past, featured artists did not necessarily receive published credit for their contributions—Stevie Wonder’s harmonica on Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” came to mind—and today, he said, a featured performer who didn’t participate in the original version of a song on an album may be added later when the single is released.

“Maroon 5’s ‘Girls Like You’ was just the band on the LP,” Mr. Trust said. “When it became a single, Cardi B was added as a featured artist. They know she’s a hot commodity. It fits in better on Top 40 radio if they have a rapper come in and do a verse.”

That makes the collaborative spirit seem a little more calculated. But, as the Beatles once observed, it’s amazing what you can do with a little help from your friends.

The reason Drake can chart 25 times from 1 album is there's no common sense rule to stop it happening. We had that here with Ed Sheeran's album last year with all 16 tracks in the top 20. That at least brought in a rule to allow a maximum of 3 tracks per artist per week.

The trend of "performer X featuring performer Y" does seem to be the rule these days rather than the exception.

British MPs are investigating the streaming system:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54551342

Streaming is now the major source of income for the record industry, generating just over £1bn last year.

But many artists say the payments they receive are negligible.

Curious slow news story the other day from the BPI who said that rap music accounted for 22% of streamed music in 2020, a new peak.

A collection of artists have issued a joint plea to British politicians on the unfair way streaming pays songwriters:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-56815282

Parliament here has been looking into this whole field, so a report will be coming at some stage.

After further calls for reform to the streaming system, Sony has announced it has written off old debts to many old acts, who might now actually stand to earn a pittance or two from the existing streaming system.

misery guts wrote:British MPs are investigating the streaming system:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54551342

Streaming is now the major source of income for the record industry, generating just over £1bn last year.

But many artists say the payments they receive are negligible.

Their recent report concluded that the whole system should be "reset" as it's so inequable between record companies and artists. But don't hold your breath on anything changing.

In happier news, Aaliyah's music will soon be available to stream, after a long difference of opinion seems finally to have been resolved one way or the other.

De La Soul are another act whose music is now finally to be available to stream. Oddly, I just saw them also guesting in an episode of Teen Titans Go! facing off with a Martian monster which had "stolen" all their music. Luckily, the day was saved.