Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show gave me a good giggle this week when they lambasted President Donald Trump’s combative new press secretary, Sean Spicer, about his attitude towards statistics.
A reporter had posed a simple question: “What is the current average national unemployment rate?” (apparently 4.2%, percent as of December 2016) to which Spicer spluttered his way through numerous inelegant replies, settling on: “He’s (Trump) not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole.”
If competitive placings and numerical indicators are no longer important meters of success or failure in government, what about music? Do charts really matter anymore? Do people still take Top 40’s, Billboard or iTunes 100, YouTube’s Trending or any other radio station’s spins on rotation into consideration when listening or buying music? And how does one gauge an artist or band’s real popularity.
Music charting used to be a simple affair during the 1950s and ’60s. Getting a song or whole album into the charts was once innocently measured purely on the sales of records and the amount of airplay it received from DJs who just ‘digged’ the song. When music started to become a real financial monopoly, price fixing, good ol’ Mafiosopayola, chart rigging and racketeering entered the fray. Soon it was impossible to honestly gauge what artists were truly bulletting through the countdown and which were pushed by big record label money and massive promotion and marketing budgets.
Then when Napster, iTunes and YouTube hit the scene and the digital music uprising took over from physical sales, the parameters of what a bonafide ‘hit’ is was redefined. Nno longer could the outdated airplay and sales formula be utilised. Now what needed to be taken into consideration was the popularity of internet performances, streaming of tracks and albums, likes, shares and followers across numerous online platforms like blogs, fora, communities and applications like Shazam, Spotify and social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Never before have the gates to the stage been so widely open to independent artists looking for an audience without knocking the big popular stars of the day out of their spotlight.
Music charting has always been mired in controversy. As soon as the music industry caught up with the new digital gig, online taste-makers were employed in promoting certain artists, ghost artist and fan clubs suddenly scattered across the most popular social platformsappeared, Twitter followers soared into the millions in days and the push to be at the top of search engines listings or part of video-trending platforms went back to the oldest trick in the book: How much money can you spend to ensure top dog position?
What the decentralisation of music distribution and play-listing has accomplished for the average Joe or Jane is giving us a more niche and personal idea of what like-minded people are listening to. We can now listen to a track online and be able to see what similar artists or genres others have downloaded and make be swept away ona musical journey of new aural discoveries.
There are also some excellent new websites where one can access a remarkably accurate analysis of how certain albums, bands, songs and artists are performing across digital platforms in real time.
Now www.rankingz.com takes the above’s position on various lists and charts, and adds the online performance and reputation of the artist in a comparable way to create their “ranking”.
And www.hypem.com keeps track of what over 650 music bloggers write about on a daily basis daily, then presents what they “discuss for analysis, consumption and discovery”. It’s a great way to connect to music writers from all over across the world and opens up a cornucopia of new and oldartists trending, all artistsare thenavailable to listen to or download.
Like the Donald, you don’t have to trust statistics from, say, iTunes Top 100 South African downloads, which include Now That’s What I Call Music 74 as a measure of popularity and taste.
You can rather exist in your own little niche online world making sure the music you love is always winning.