Sorry, the Monday Morning Mediabase Update is going to be delayed until the evening. I’m in another timezone and having issues with AllAccess. But I’ll still create the post to give people a chance to discuss numbers.
There was an interesting discussion in BB ChartBeat about comparing Hot 100 chart toppers across the decades. Is it meaningful given the changing chart rules and how the industry is moving? “Uptown Funk” achieved 14 weeks on the top of the Hot 100 last week (likely to be relegated to second this week due to “See You Again” from Fast and Furious 7 kicking all kinds of butt on the sales and streaming charts), but long chart runs have become more common.
Eric, who asks the question notes:
The Chart Beat column on April 2 listed all 29 songs to accomplish the feat since the Hot 100 began, and it’s no coincidence that all but two of those hits charted after Billboard began compiling data from Nielsen BDS and SoundScan in late 1991. So, something that happened only twice in the chart’s first 33 years has now occurred 27 times in the last 23.
It really is a combination of the new chart rules and the way the the industry is lurching. The audience is in the driver’s seat and they seem to actually like listening to the same songs over and over (despite the numerous complaints about that – it seems that people are only complaining that radio keeps playing songs that they don’t like over and over, they like hearing the songs they like over and over). With the information that PDs are getting from various sources, they know that certain songs like “Uptown Funk” are staying popular and fans of that song can’t hear it enough. Services like Spotify, On-Demmand and Youtube allow people to pick what they want to listen to and they like listening to “Uptown Funk”. They buy it, they stream it, they watch the video and they request it from radio. So, radio plays the crap out of it. All the numbers add up to #1 on the charts for months. The feedback loop of all this information causes old hits to stay around longer and it makes it harder for new songs to get any notice at all. People are picking the songs they now from iTunes, Spotify, etc, so the songs they don’t know don’t stand much of a chance.
Before it was evil PDs dictating what we listened to and bought. Now it is us.
