Billboard Have To Figure Out What To Do When Song Sales Doesn’t Equal Popularity
Hand Billboard this, they’ve tried and tried to remain relevant and if they could just figure out a matrix that makes sense for musical popularity, they might have pulled it off. We live in a world where 500 albums sold in a week can you get into you the Billboard 200 and 50,000 albums sold can get you to the top of the Billboard 200. The numbers don’t compute and when you analyze them further, for the chart proper, you’ll note that streaming just about never moves the needle. I have seen exactly one time where a single has sold most copies yet not been first (Justin Bieber beaten out by the Weeknd).
But what can Billboard d?. They could use a streaming only chart but then it wouldn’t be important enough, or they could give streaming equal weight as sales, but that doesn’t sound right. It appears as though they monetize the streams, but that isn’t remotely close to accurate.
People hate Billboard because all the reviews are public acts of fellatio and the news isn’t news and the writing sucks.
All true.
BUT
Take a look at the reviews in Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, they are for the most part acts of public fellatio. Nobody in their right minds believe them. Pitchfork so badly need rock stars for their huge moneymaking festivals, they can’t tell the truth. All you have to do is see who is getting the “7 Plus” reviews to know who is appearing at the next festival. Call it the Freddie Gibb syndrome. All these guys do is punch down or suck up, they never perform a really powerful hit job on a major star if there isn’t something happening in the backgroud (pace: M.I.A.). They were rotten to Taylor for five years before they caught up and started giving her raves. They were repulsive to Maria Taylor FOR HER ENTIRE CAREER.
Rolling Stone is in many ways worse. U2 and Bruce are untouchables, you have to interpret their star reviews. If Bruce gets 4.5 stars out of 5 it means its a dog with fleas. They lie about their old reviews (egregiously changing a two star review of Nevermind to 3 stars a decade later), and they are clueless about moidern music even where they play catchup and write “trap” ob every other hip hop review. When in doubt both publications rewrite Vampire Weekend Press Releases and pretend they noticed it themselves. They are professional liars.
Billboard is worse (I once counted up 50 reviews and found not one negative, if you are gonna write PR releases become a PR company), but they aren’t THAT MUCH WORSE.
And if the charts were great, I’d forgive them everything. But they are terrible, they have no meaning. There are 300 Million plus people in the US, if 50,000 people bought your album that is less that 0.25% of the country. But still # 1 on Billboard
