From vinyl to cassettes to digital downloads, the music industry is constantly evolving, but only now are the Billboard charts catching up to the 21st century.
Earlier this year, Billboard incorporated digital downloads into its Hot 100 singles chart, which reflects all genres. And earlier this month, it did the same for its Latin and hip-hop charts to reflect activity on Spotify and Rhapsody.
The move is reflective of a general attitude trying to keep the charts updated to how people are listening to music through social media and digital distribution sites.
“It’s a much better representation, (because) radio play is not a very good metric anymore,” said Jack Gould, saxophonist for local band Sassafraz. “People aren’t selling albums, but it doesn’t mean people aren’t listening. Even though the record company has declined for the past 15 years, that doesn’t mean that the music industry isn’t bigger than it’s ever been.”
For local bands, the shift in the charts’ metric only reinforces the need for a strong online presence in order to get noticed by a label.
Billboard even has a YouTube chart that tracks all the views on the site for the most popular music videos and ranks them. Korean pop artist PSY is currently No. 1 on the chart and No. 2 on the Hot 100 chart.
Hil Hackworth of Dysfunktional Family, however, doesn’t like the addition of YouTube views to the charts, because the number of views can be easily increased.
“I think it’s too easy to manipulate YouTube views,” Hackworth said. “It does open it up and give a lot more opportunity to underground and local bands, but it still needs work.”
Just because a video has 1 million views doesn’t necessarily mean that 1 million people listened to it. People watch videos several times, and sometimes people watch videos in groups, so the reach of the video is not entirely accurate.
Hackworth said some people write code to increase their number of views for the first few hours it is posted in order to make the video go viral or simply gain a larger audience.
However, YouTube still plays a smaller role in configuring the charts than digital downloads, which in 2011 surpassed physical record and single sales for the first time.
“Before (iTunes), you were locked into buying the whole CD for one song,” said Dave Alexander of Dave Rave. “Now you pay a dollar, which is a reasonable amount, and you get exactly what you want. It changed the game so that anyone can compete.”
Although iTunes has been in the market for more than 10 years, many think that Billboard is moving too slowly to keep up with a wildly changing industry.
“I think with all the changes on the Internet, the industry has to change, which they have been so slow in doing,” Hackworth said. “It needs a lot of work and tightening of the screws.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
