Music Charts No Longer Make Sense (qz.com) 167
American rapper Future's back to back new albums have created a stir among music enthusiasts and the studios alike. Billboard today refreshed its weekly US Top 200 chart, and the American rapper officially became the first artist to ever knock his own album out of the #1 spot with another one of his albums. Future released the self-titled FUTURE on Feb. 17. One week later, the artist then dropped a second album HNDRXX which is the new champion. What does it mean, though? Confusion, some say. From a report on Quartz: Up till December 2014, Billboard's Top 200 chart -- which pulls its numbers from data juggernaut Nielsen -- measured new music in the US only by album sales. As music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, came into the mainstream, Nielsen and Billboard revamped their system to be based off "units." How does is work? One "unit" is equivalent to either one album sale, 10 track sales, or 1,500 song streams. In other words, listeners on a streaming platform would need to stream a Future song 1,500 times for it to count the same way a single album purchase does.
While that number may seem high, consider that it costs (more or less) $9.99 a month to stream tens of thousands of songs, as opposed to dropping $10-15 on a single album to own it, either physically or digitally. That means people who subscribe to online streaming services aren't taking out an additional cost to listen to every new Future song or album or the same ones over and over again -- it's essentially free. It becomes an odd, if necessary, way of calculating charts, because it means people who pay the most for an artist's music count for the least when sales are tallied.
Music makes no sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Rap is fucking garbage. People talk over a 8 second music loop and win Best Artist because they look good and dance around. There's no music being created anymore, it's all a sad performance for poor black people.
Re: Music makes no sense (Score:1)
Yep. There are a very small amount of rappers that create their own music and aren't trying to write a rhyming stanza with a 100 word vocabulary.
Re:Music makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that rap is fucking garbage. On the other hand, you also have to agree that western and country music are also fucking garbage.
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I agree 100% with your entire post.
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So do I. I listen to and enjoy most genres of music, but rap and country are just horrible.
Re:Music makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I would like to comment that not all country is horrible. The really old stuff, and related genres like bluegrass, had musical value I think: these were authentic artists, not corporate-created caricatures. But you're looking at stuff from the 40s-70s or so. Johnny Cash, for instance, I think is a good example of an authentic country music artist. It's not my preferred style of music by any stretch, but I can recognize the value. But all the stuff that's sold as country these days is utter trash, and a lot of it seems to basically be "redneck rock".
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Bluegrass is still around, and includes some very sharp artists, both technical players and composers (but then, I guess you could say the same about medieval-style folk music). It has almost no overlap with modern country music (which is just pop music with a southern accent, these days).
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Or a heart that is moved by other types of music. That twangy stuff doesn't work for me. Very little rock music is moving to me either, although I do enjoy some specific rock bands.
In general, my most listened to genres are classical, ambient, downtempo/chillwave, lounge, jazz noir, new age, trip-hop and trance.
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I agree that rap is fucking garbage. On the other hand, you also have to agree that western and country music are also fucking garbage.
I'd go so far as to say 90% of everything is garbage.
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"I'd go so far as to say 90% of everything is garbage."
But ... is Garbage garbage?
90% of it.
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I'm sure that Sturgeon's Revelation applies.
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I generally agree with you regarding country, but a friend of mine turned me onto Eric Church.
Here's Kill a Word live at Red Rocks by Eric Church (lyrics as well). Great venue, great song, the woman is a little over the top at times (in my opinion).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Lyrics:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics... [azlyrics.com]
Yeah, he sings about drinking as well, but he has song good songs, Springsteen is another I like.
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Ain't just "rap", either... (Score:3)
Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols (usually some pretty teenaged kid with a previous 'career' as a Disney 'talent employee'), new stars with a pre-baked 'image' (naturally built/provided by the studio), lyrics that are focus-group-tested and written by someone else, a catchy tune usually ripped-off from some unknown who got paid a pittance for it...
Most *music* these days is fucking garbage. Okay, some of that may be the 'get off my lawn' syndrome on my part, but honestly, in the past the musician an
Re:Ain't just "rap", either... (Score:4, Insightful)
Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols (usually some pretty teenaged kid with a previous 'career' as a Disney 'talent employee'), new stars with a pre-baked 'image' (naturally built/provided by the studio), lyrics that are focus-group-tested and written by someone else, a catchy tune usually ripped-off from some unknown who got paid a pittance for it...
Most *music* these days is fucking garbage. Okay, some of that may be the 'get off my lawn' syndrome on my part, but honestly, in the past the musician and/or band usually had to come up with everything themselves: lyrics, chords, composition, image, vision, etc. Even as late as the 1990s or so, there were still artists who did it themselves, and the quality tended to show through more readily. Yes there were pre-baked 'stars' in the past as well, but their appeal tended to die off pretty quickly, or their star faded long before their second album... much like, well, today. It's just that the signal-to-noise ratio went to hell of late.
Appreciation of music is inherently subjective, so I won't argue with whatever makes something garbage to you, but some of the elements you list just don't matter to me. I don't care if the performer wrote the song or not, or if a producer packaged them to be more appealing to an audience. If I like the song I like the song, and I don't have to be a purist about it.
Do you feel the same way about a car or a computer? Would Photoshop have more value to you if it was produced by a single person? Does a car have more authenticity if the body and the engine come from the same team?
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Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols
Most *music* these days is fucking garbage.
Nailed it. I scan up and down the dial on the radio and 98% of what I hear is autotuned SHIT. The other 2% is non-autotuned SHIT.
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Plato talked about trying to use radio to learn about music, but the company insisted that it would sell better if he wrote about caves and shadows. (To be fair, caves were HYUUGE in that market at that time.)
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I scan up and down the dial on the radio and 98% of what I hear is autotuned SHIT.
I remember scanning up and down the dial on the radio in the 80s, and most of it was interchangeable big-hair bands and bubblegum synth-euro-pop. I can't remember the names of most of them because I've forgotten. I only remember the good stuff and the not-so-good-but-iconic stuff.
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I remember scanning up and down the dial on the radio in the 80s
Yeah, there was a lot of awful sucktastic shit music in the 80s.
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Hasn't pop music long been dominated by corporate interests?
There's this cyclic quality where you have a phase of monochromatic, interchangeable artists who are mostly tools of their agents and publishers. Then a handful of artists or some region comes up with some unique twist which gains traction but doesn't always become mainstream.
This "new sound" is then taken up by lots of artists, some of which build on it and others which merely imitate it, the music industry notices it and then heavily promotes it
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You sound like someone who lost their intell sources. (I remember going through that, as a metalhead in the 1990s when metal didn't die even slightly, but nevertheless disappeared from radio, neighborhood brick'n'mortar stores, etc. I went through some dismal years before I learned to research, and then started to discover a portion of what had been happening under my nose.)
All that stuff about autotune, Disney, focus-group-tested lyrics represents a virtually non-existent share of music. You are flaming o
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Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols (usually some pretty teenaged kid with a previous 'career' as a Disney 'talent employee'), new stars with a pre-baked 'image' (naturally built/provided by the studio), lyrics that are focus-group-tested and written by someone else, a catchy tune usually ripped-off from some unknown who got paid a pittance for it...
Hey hey, we're the Monkees!
Pop music has been that way from the beginning - only autotune is new.
But don't despair, there's plenty of talent out there, it's just that radio is garbage these days unless you find a good public station, so you'll never hear them that way.
Nowadays, to find the good stuff, you have to cast a really wide net
One can only hope streaming sites make this easier, to replace the radio wasteland. Also, lots of obscure bands are on YouTube which can make discovering similar bands a bit easier.
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Pop music has been that way from the beginning - only autotune is new.
Exactly. The early-to-mid-1960s was the era of British Invasion, the height of the golden age of Broadway, and they heyday of Bob Dylan and John Coltraine. It was also the era of Surfin' Bird and Al Hirt's Java.
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If you go farther back, there were many popular performers who did not write their own songs. Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Elvis Presley... all examples of people whose performed songs written by others. The girl groups of the 60s like The Supremes also did not write their songs. More recently there are pop stars such as Madonna, whose early hits were written by others.
On the other hand, singer-songwriters also go back a long way. The performers from the original golden age of blues did their own songs (t
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There's tons of great music out there besides classical, especially in rock IMO. The key is, you need to listen to rock from the 60s-80s or so only. It's not going anywhere.
Yeah, it sucks that modern music is so horrible. But that's OK, we can still listen to the good stuff from yesteryear.
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Ignore the text in my link and just check out the links, it's a collection that I've made with others of modern good music, mostly avantgarde, metal, and electronic. I'm not sure if we have the same tastes, but I think it's still worthwhile to check a few just because it shows that there are still artists who invest effort in their music.
https://www.facebook.com/lnate... [facebook.com]
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The only kind of music I listen to nowadays is classical. Hard to fake that.
I wonder about Stockhausen sometimes.
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Rap is fucking garbage. People talk over a 8 second music loop and win Best Artist because they look good and dance around. There's no music being created anymore, it's all a sad performance for poor black people.
Apart from the poor bit (Rappers seem to have too much money) I agree completely.
However they're nowhere near as bad as electronic/dubstep. These are people who randomly throw together sounds like a 3 year old banging on pots and pans... No, wait, that is an insult to 3 year olds.
I'm certain I could write a script that could perform the same function. In fact, as soon as Japan solves the uncanny valley problem, all of the music chart will be virutal.
There's little wonder the newest song to be found
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I have some music in my collection that's only a year or three old. The thing is, it's all from bands that got started back in the 70s and 80s. They're still playing their own instruments and singing with their real voices. Unfortunately, they're not getting any younger, and I imagine will be retiring before too long. But maybe not; Roger Waters AFAIK is still touring and he's in his 70s now.
Re: Music makes no sense (Score:2)
There are more than enough good bands today - even though I listen mostly to prog rock (and Pink Floyd) is my favourite band, most of my music collection isn't that old. For some strange reason Poland has a lot of decent prog bands, case in point: Riverside.
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Which is really a shame, because rap COULD be an entertaining music form.
The gangsta rap, which seems to be the only kind being made now, never really took off in my country. Instead rap became more a style of putting together strange and often rather amusing rhymes - without all the edgelord crap of saying fuck every third word, talking about bitches, niggas etc. Paraphrasing and translating one song I recall from a decade ago:
He's cool, he's tough, can do as he wishes
... Unless the girlfriend tells him t
Streaming = Radio (Score:4, Interesting)
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Radio plays are paid for by the record companies.
In the 1950s they made it illegal to pay DJs to play music. A day later the job of 'program director' was invented. It has never been illegal to pay a program director to play music.
Re:Streaming = Radio (Score:4, Interesting)
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...your local radio station isn't being paid to play the Beatles.
How many commercial radio stations are truly local anymore? Most have been bought up by some corporation like Clear Channel on the other side of the country.
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payola is only used for promotion (e.g. new music), your local radio station isn't being paid to play the Beatles.
Oddly enough, the music charts are generally also only full of new music, and rarely if ever contain a Beatles album. Weird, huh.
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Check the top 200. You'll see The Beatles in there. What is surprising though is Pink Floyd's DSotM is absent.
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I've noticed that classic rock stations start playing a band's catalog very heavily a week to a month before the band announces a new tour or album.
You think there is no money changing hands? Whenever their is a new Stones or Eagles (just for example) thing happening, you know it before it's announced, because all the clear channel classic rock stations are burning them up. The classic rock catalog is a mile deep, but somehow the same songs are played day after day after day.
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In the 1950s they made it illegal to pay DJs to play music. A day later the job of 'program director' was invented. It has never been illegal to give massive free prizes like money, cars, vacation packages, and concert tickets to play music.
FTFY. ;)
It's a lot more subtle these days, and rarely if ever involves giving money directly to a station (or rather, a syndicate of stations). Instead, the studios give them high-ticket items and/or money in the form of 'contest prizes' (with of course a small percentage to the station as a 'handling fee' to pay for 'advertising' the 'contest'), in exchange for pushing a coterie of favored 'hits' from that studio up on the playlist, often over time as they come out.
The contests/giveaways are then used to d
"Payment" == a vote, a "listen" less so (Score:2)
Its not a perfect fit but the radio analogy is a good one and streaming may deserve no more influence than radio. A "listen" does not necessarily suggest a "like", while a "payment" for a specific album/song can be strongly correlated with a like. A person may listen to a song once or
Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing in TFS explains to me why, "Music Charts No Longer Make Sense". Is it because an artist overtook himself on the charts? Is it because they've had to change their chart system to keep up with technology?
Maybe charts don't make sense anymore, maybe they still do, but I have no idea whether they do or not from reading TFS.
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Re:Headline (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing in TFS explains to me why, "Music Charts No Longer Make Sense". Is it because an artist overtook himself on the charts? Is it because they've had to change their chart system to keep up with technology?
No, it's because the chart system is not made to deal with this marketing gimmick. The artists clearly had both albums recorded and mastered at the same time, there is no reason they couldn't have been released as single double-length album. He set this up specifically to take the title of "first artist to displace himself at the top of the chart" and get all this free publicity.
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...or because he decided to release an album upon finishing production on an album's worth of music
No, he didn't. He released the albums one-week apart. That's not even enough time for the production of the actual physical copies, let alone write the songs, record the songs, go through final production and mastering of the audio content, and design the packaging. He would have had to complete the creative component of the second album far before the first album was done. It's impossible for the reason to be "he did one album and then he did the second right after that". The logistics don't allow that kin
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They don't make any sense because they only track artist signed to specific labels... You can have the #1 track on the cmj chart which is college radio and covers airplay for 200-ish college radio stations but still not be tracked for the billboard charts regardless of sales.
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Rap should be classified as poetry. In the chart, it would go right below Vogon poetry.
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Rap should be classified as poetry. In the chart, it would go right below Vogon poetry.
No... Vogon poetry, according to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, has a good chance of killing the listener. Rap has never killed anyone. The Rapper might have, but that's a different story....
Nothing of value left to measure (Score:1, Insightful)
There seems to be a deliberate attempt to destroy the sensibilities, intellect ,morals of the population by putting out of all of this out of tune, profane, creepy, depressing, dismal, tasteless, trashy, low grade music that appeals mainly to crackheads, deadbeats stoners, self obsessed and arrogant millenials, sado-depressive types and the like. Pop, rap, rock, its all garbage. Real music disappeared long ago, Now we have this bleak, dystopian nonsense that seems to be designed to destroy the minds of thos
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self obsessed and arrogant millenials
Coming from the guy who is telling everybody else what they should like. I trust the irony isn't lost on you?
Re:Nothing of value left to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, I am sorry you feel that way but I disagree. There is still a lot of interesting music being produced if you know where to look. I agree that most everything listed on the Billboard top 200 will fit your description, but that list only covers music which a small group of record labels have defined to be appealing to the largest groups of people. It sounds like your tastes do not fit with that assumption (mine do not either) but all that means is that you have to work a little harder to find stuff you like.
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Get off my lawn!
Seriously though, I am sorry you feel that way but I disagree. There is still a lot of interesting music being produced if you know where to look. I agree that most everything listed on the Billboard top 200 will fit your description, but that list only covers music which a small group of record labels have defined to be appealing to the largest groups of people. It sounds like your tastes do not fit with that assumption (mine do not either) but all that means is that you have to work a little harder to find stuff you like.
I could agree with GP poster if he meant 2016 and 2017. The pop music and top charts have been incredibly bleak the last year and half, but it is a local trend, and probably won't last. If the GP meant modern music in general, he should get off his own lawn and hide behind the curtains.
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There is still a lot of interesting music being produced if you know where to look.
That is a MIGHTY big "if" there buddy.
There are millions (billions?) of people like me. People who lost their connections to "the scene" or who never had any connections so they did not even know a scene existed.
Meh.
I am glad that there is new, interesting, and artistic music out there. To me and many others, it may as well not even exist.
You could do myself and the OP a real solid though... tell us how to find this music. If it includes changing my lifestyle to hang out in seedy bars so that I can find one
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>
You could do myself and the OP a real solid though... tell us how to find this music. If it includes changing my lifestyle to hang out in seedy bars so that I can find one good artist in 20 years, your suggestion will be a no-go.
Start reading music blogs. I'm mostly into metal, so I read The Toilet Ov Hell, which covers a decently wide selection of metal, and has an opinionated and irreverent style that I really enjoy. I would say that site probably accounts for 80% of my new music discoveries. It introduced me to synthwave as well, way off the metal path, but similar in some ways. The trick is to find a music blog for the genres you like, but you can google for album reviews and find some of the more interesting sites after the fi
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Wow! I great answer. Thank you for the solid. You are awesome. I am a metal kind of guy myself.
Re:Nothing of value left to measure (Score:5, Insightful)
There's other music out there besides that produced by "the music industry". There's a big cottage industry of indie artists out there, producing their own recordings in their garages or maybe renting studio time, and doing everything themselves. Of course, none of these people are getting rich, and it's not that easy to find this stuff (and find stuff among it that you really like), but it is out there thanks to the Internet.
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And surprisingly enough, a lot of that stuff is actually on Spotify and Google Play Music (and probably other streaming services too). If you want to get more indie than that, Bandcamp is a great place to look.
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Usury: noun The illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.
Are you sure that word means what you think it does?
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Yeah! Wagner [wikipedia.org] should take that operatic garbage back to Leipzig, and all right thinking people should only buy Cantata. Bach [wikipedia.org] must be rolling over in his grave!
And get off my commons you hooligans!
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Really? Because from where I'm sitting, with an Spotify subscription, ~250 CDs and a bunch of merch bought at concerts, I feel like I'm being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of quality music being produced and performed today.
You just have to find one or more genres that are out of the mainstream, and don't get radio play, and you'll find a ton of amazing music from dedicated hard-working artists. My particular groove is mostly metal and dark synthwave, with a smattering of hard rock and a little bit of und
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s/ ,morals/, morals/
s/out of all/out all/
s/deadbeats stoners/deadbeats, stoners/
s/its/it's/
s/ago,/ago./
s/nothing/nothing's/
s/here,/here./
s/hollywood/Hollywood/
i could repeat this in a surly voice, over a drumbeat generated by Rebirth, and it would make pretty good rap.
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Seriously, this.
Spotify has an estimated 100 million users. The recommendation engine has ridiculous amounts of data available to it and as a result, the recommendations are damn solid. Will I like everything on my "Discover Weekly" list? No, of course not! But there is at least one or two tracks that I find really interesting every week, usually even more.
Your Math Makes No Sense (Score:2)
Each month (30 days) has 43200 minutes (30 * 24 * 60), and each song is about 4 minutes long, give or take. I could only listen to about 10,000 songs if that's all I did 24/7. But, you know, I sleep, I talk to people, I read, I work. So my music listening accounts for a much smaller part of my day. Maybe 4 hours worth (but in reality, much less because I tend to spend more time listening to podcasts). So I listen to 10-15 songs a day. I'm not a teenager, but even a teenager has to turn the music off a
streaming brings in the most revenue (Score:2)
which is why it's weighed so much. very few people are paying $10 for these album things anymore. even fewer are paying $80 or whatever it costs for a vinyl now
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I basically only buy physical albums if I'm at a show and I really love the band, or if one of a very select few bands* puts out a new album on LP. Everything else is Spotify (which has saved me SO MUCH money every month, it's not even funny) or Bandcamp.
* Basically just 3 or 4 of my absolute favorite bands, who also happen to play genres that I think fit the LP format. Stoner rock, retro music in general, that sort of thing.
Elimintate the Record Labels (Score:2)
Less/better slang please! (Score:5, Funny)
I know in the US the slang is to "drop an album" but I would much prefer if slashdot would use the more widely understood "pooped out an album". ;)
As if they ever meant anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the pay to play nature of radio, charts only ever really showed who paid the most money for airtime.
They've been meaningless for a long time now.
Why 1500:1? (Score:3)
One “unit” is equivalent to either one album sale, 10 track sales, or 1,500 song streams ...
It becomes an odd, if necessary, way of calculating charts, because it means people who pay the most for an artist's music count for the least when sales are tallied.
But consumers don't really care which songs earn the artist the most money, they care which ones are the most popular songs. When I buy an album I rarely listen to it more than a few times after the purchase (but I'll come back to it later). I don't understand the 1500:1 ratio for streams to albums when computing rank. It seems like 10:1 or 100:1 would be a more fair representation of how much people like it. Even for songs that I really like, if they come up too many times in rotation in my playlists, I'll vote it down because I get tired of the same song over and over.
And if I buy a track, it's because I really like that track and didn't want the album, so why does it take 10 track sales to equal one album sale?
I guess the answer is that the Billboard Charts aren't meant to reflect popularity, but just revenue, which certainly has value to the industry, but not so much to individual listeners.
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You know that "repeat" mode on music players that plays the single same song over and over again?
My SO uses it all the time, playing his favorite song while doing chores. Now we have an offline player so it won't be counted, but think what it means for the statistics of lists from people who use that mode regularly on a streaming service. A song
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What about people who add it to their "My Music" or playlists in whichever streaming service they use, and play it back regularly?
Shouldn't those deliberate actions count more?
It's still unclear (Score:2)
From the summary:
While that number may seem high, consider that it costs (more or less) $9.99 a month to stream tens of thousands of songs, as opposed to dropping $10-15 on a single album to own it, either physically or digitally. That means people who subscribe to online streaming services aren't taking out an additional cost to listen to every new Future song or album or the same ones over and over again -- it's essentially free.
This is kind of bullshit. It's not "essentially free", it's essentially $9.99/month. To take me as an example, I had pretty much stopped buying music entirely until Spotify came along. I didn't buy new music anymore, and I didn't buy old music anymore. I was spending $0/month for a few years. Now I subscribe to Spotify, and I pay $9.99/month.
Now guess what happened: I surprising amount of the time, I listen to albums on Spotify that I already own. It's just easier to listen to them i
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a big part of why I subscribe is that I don't want to spend time doing that math.
Same here. Its like having an unlimited plan on your mobile instead of counting minutes even if you rarely go over - its one less thing to think about and once the price comes down enough what you're really paying for is the convenience of swapping a known quantity for an unknown one. At $9.99/mo or whatever its generally well worth it.
I'd do the same for movies too - at $29 or even $49 / mo for all major studios I'd spend far more every year than I do today, but would still happily sign up.
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I'd do the same for movies too - at $29 or even $49 / mo for all major studios I'd spend far more every year than I do today, but would still happily sign up.
I agree. It would really take out the "do I want to spend money on this" factor?
Basically, it's like piracy, but legal and only slightly more expensive!
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Now guess what happened: I surprising amount of the time, I listen to albums on Spotify that I already own. It's just easier to listen to them in Spotify than to keep them separate. When I'm listening to albums that I haven't purchased, I'm often listening to the same albums or playlists over and over again. To be honest, it's possible that I'm just not even getting my money's worth, that if I'd gathered up all those $9.99/month payments, I could have purchased all the music that I listen to.
I do the same thing, and most people probably listen to albums they already own/already love most of the time. That's why they're our favorite albums :-)
When I started subscribing to Spotify, I divided my (ripped to MP3) music collection into two separate parts: "On Spotify" and "Not on Spotify", simply to get an overview of which albums I own and love, which aren't on Spotify for whichever reason. In my case, it's around 1,800 songs. The "On Spotify" part counted almost 15,000 songs. For now, I'm keeping e
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I totally forgot my point about the "On Spotify" vs "Not on Spotify" thing.
While I was going through my collection, I realized that I maybe only listen to ~200 songs on a regular basis, maybe even fewer than that. Everything else is just occasional listening or for novelty.
On the other hand, I used to spend $50 or more on new albums every single month. Spotify saves me a LOT of money.
Of course not. (Score:3)
It stopped being anything to do with actual musical talent and started being all about marketing to gullible teenagers like 50+ years ago.
Movie awards no longer make sense either (Score:2, Insightful)
Mediocre black movie gets awards the year after the event is boycotted for not having enough black nominees. Affirmitive action for the win, at the cost of actual talent.
I love the music industry today... (Score:2)
Wait.
I don't mean the mainstream music industry.
I don't stream music. I have a band I really like I have pre-ordered their last few CDs because they kick ass. (Clutch)
For the most part, I have been finding new/old music on Youtube. I can find channels I like, find artists I like, get recommendations, etc. I can also rip channel playlists from youtube, burn them to a CD as mp3 so I can listen in my car. I have found plenty of stuff I like that way, and if I really like them I can buy their album on whatev
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Honestly, you would enjoy Spotify. It creates recommendations for you, based on your play history and playlists. You can share music and recommendations with friends, the curated playlists are actually really good and the selection is huuuuuge.
"Streaming" does not automatically imply "mainstream". 95% of the stuff I listen to on Spotify is obscure (it would certainly never feature on their main front page playlists/radios), but thanks to the gigantic user base, Spotify still manages to put together some rea
Try our new unit of measure (Score:2)
I think I see the problem here, and might know just what you need. Here at Cajun Hell Enterprises, we have developed a proprietary unit of measure which fits your case perfectly.
We call it "Dollar" (TM). Instead of counting arbitrary "units" and then defining various other sub-unit types as being
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Yes, it seems like they're trying to conflate popularity and gross revenue and complaining the results aren't useful for measuring one or the other.
Shaking my cane (Score:2)
I couldn't care less what any music chart says or claims or shows. Why would I? I listen to things I like, not to what other people think is popular. In fact, if masses of people like it then I'll probably find it a crashing bland bore.
Sing along, consumer: "Oooh ooh yeah baby ooh yeah yeah autotune me baby, ooh yeah pop a cap in that nigga, womenz be hoes, make dat' money ooh ooh slap dat bish, ooh yeah Justin Bieber, ooh yeah"
Look for that on the Top 100 in a day or so. Oh, wait, that IS the first 50 song
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I mostly agree with you, but the simple fact is that a lot of people primarily want to listen to what's popular, what they hear at clubs/bars or on the radio, what their friends like. And because their friends go to the same clubs/bars and listen to the same radio stations, pop music tends to become something of an echo chamber. People want to listen to popular music because it's popular.
And there's nothing wrong with that. People want to listen to the music that makes them happy, and if that happiness come
I love rap music (Score:3, Interesting)
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So you patronize artists who are overly sexist and promote violent ideals, and further lecture folks who make a similar judgement of the broad narrative of rap but also harbor commonplace racism. Neat.
And how is this different from rock music, for instance?
Mainstream rock of the 70s and 80s was definitely sexist and/or violent, depending on which bands you listened to.
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Here's a chart that matters (more) (Score:2)
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This just in: Copyright infringers are normal people like everyone else, with similar shitty taste.
I was curious ... (Score:2)
I wanted to know what the Stream option could translate into Album Sales, so I did some quick math:
If you streamed music 24/7, your activity could be counted as 9.6 album sales per month.
Assumptions:
A month is 30 days
A song is 3 minutes long
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approaches zero (Score:2)
Nielsen should count the number of fucks we have to give.
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I only hate the crap music. There is still so much amazingly good music being made, but just like every other decade, 99% of everything is shit. That's just how it is.
Then again, I'm only 31, so not really in the "get off my lawn" segment quite yet ;-)