What will or should WOGL use as replacements for Elvis & The Beatles?

oldies76 said:

Well I guess we can all blame the Soundscan era for this! That's why I never rank these #1's that are on top for 2-3 months at a time, with the real achievers of pre-1992 Soundscan. I might as well divide it up 1955-1991, 1992-2017, two distinct eras.

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That may well be--it was just an easy way to identify a good sampling of top songs in a few minutes time. Certainly some won't test well and won't get played no matter how they performed at the time, and vice versa.

semoochie said:

Wait a minute. Are you saying that songs that actually sold well, were not as big of hits as those that may have?

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They were big hits and many are nice songs. But I believe their charts stats are a bit inflated because of the chart methodology change in late 1991 and now free streaming is having a huge influence and advantage on chart performance. And because of that, I refuse to rank them with pre-soundscan songs. If you look at a listing of the top 100 songs from 1955 through today, a good portion of them are post '91. Now, it seems any popular song (whether good or bad) will score 8-14 weeks at the top with ease it seems, and beating all the older greats in the process.

I thought SoundScan actually gave a more accurate picture of what the chart was, at least in part, supposed to reflect: how well the song was selling. In the "golden era," the charts were manipulated nearly to the point of irrelevance. The problem with SoundScan was that the accurate sales reports turned the charts to sludge; there wasn't really enough movement from week to week once the human (corrupt) element was taken away. No matter what you think of post-1991 popular music, there's no denying it has been legitimately popular. And population growth means that more people have listened to those hits in their prime music-listening and buying years than listened to it back when all the "good music" was on the charts.

CTListener said:

I thought SoundScan actually gave a more accurate picture of what the chart was, at least in part, supposed to reflect: how well the song was selling. In the "golden era," the charts were manipulated nearly to the point of irrelevance. The problem with SoundScan was that the accurate sales reports turned the charts to sludge; there wasn't really enough movement from week to week once the human (corrupt) element was taken away. No matter what you think of post-1991 popular music, there's no denying it has been legitimately popular. And population growth means that more people have listened to those hits in their prime music-listening and buying years than listened to it back when all the "good music" was on the charts.

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Are you saying that they're no longer using SoundScan?

semoochie said:

Are you saying that they're no longer using SoundScan?

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I believe they are, but airplay is a bigger part of the equation. Maybe David E. can provide a better explanation.

CTListener said:

I believe they are, but airplay is a bigger part of the equation. Maybe David E. can provide a better explanation.

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Who is the "they" in your sentence?

TheBigA said:

Who is the "they" in your sentence?

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I was going with the industry as a whole, using SoundScan or some similar technology as opposed to reports from stores. I suppose that now, it has to be adapted to online orders but it seems like the same basic concept.

DavidEduardo said:

And now that is being replaced with on-demand streaming. It's a case of following the money that consumers spend for music.

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It's streaming today, that's also making many songs chart much higher than they should or spend too many weeks at #1 or in the top 10. Why isn't streaming (like You Tube streaming) regulated more or a pay service? I mean, anyone can click a song x number of times to help it's cause and only hear a portion. Back in our day, we paid for a song at the record store and waited to hear it on Top 40 radio stations. Now today, free streaming can help a song tremendously. And you can hear it 20 times a day and help keep it at #1 for weeks on end. (Nobody in their right mind would buy 20 CD-singles of the same song). You click on a hot current song on You Tube and see that it has tens of millions of views. Playing a song on the internet, should be the same as buying a 45. Without that control, we'll continue to see song performances on the Hot 100 charts, inflated.

semoochie said:

I was going with the industry as a whole, using SoundScan or some similar technology as opposed to reports from stores. I suppose that now, it has to be adapted to online orders but it seems like the same basic concept.

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It would be nice if things were as simple as using one source. In the case of Billboard, they obviously use Soundscan, since it is their own technology. But even they have realized they have to adapt to the new music marketplace, as has the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) which certifies sales figures in order to present Gold and Platinum records. A few years ago, Billboard recognized this and decided to release two charts: One for Airplay and the other that included airplay, streaming, and downloading. I notice several other publications have adopted this system as well.

How this applies to this particular thread and WOGL, I think it will make music decisions more complicated, and will make music testing more important. Because there is no single chart that can be used as a dependable source for music choices. That's when it helps to have specific local information to draw on, rather than national charts like Billboard or Soundscan.

oldies76 said:

I mean, anyone can click a song x number of times to help it's cause and only hear a portion.

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That's correct. There's a repeat function on the YouTube player, so it's possible for fans of an artist to drive up YouTube plays this way without actually sitting in the room and listening to the song. The industry knows this, and the RIAA has a metric that it applies so that a stream of a song doesn't count as much as a sale. As you can imagine, this is a controversial issue in both the music and media business, because while a stream isn't counted as a sale, the streamer is charged full rate. So the music industry wants to be paid as though it's a sale, but they admit that it shouldn't count as much. Will we see "regulation?" It's one of those things where regulators are hoping the industry will settle it themselves.

DavidEduardo said:

The purpose of Soundscan was to show actual product moving from retail to consumers, as opposed to movement at the wholesale and rack jobber level.

Then came downloads, which replaced much of retail music sales. And now that is being replaced with on-demand streaming. It's a case of following the money that consumers spend for music.

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So why did the Hot 100 -- and CHR playlists -- turn to sludge soon after the change? Downloading was in its infancy in 1992, yet that year you had marathon stays at No. 1 for "End of the Road," "Jump" and "I Will Always Love You," and it only got worse in succeeding years. Was SoundScan behind the ultra-conservatism of CHR programmers in those early years, or was some other factor at work?

DavidEduardo said:

As more programmers look at creative use of statistics, like the Discover weekly playlist from Spotify, they will be doing deeper dives into the statistics of music research such as cluster analysis. Spotify's algorithm identifies "outliers" quite effectively but sometimes radio does not.

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There's also BuzzAngle Music, which is trying to compete with Billboard. Any time you have numbers and computers, you have different ways of interpreting those numbers.

CTListener said:

So why did the Hot 100 -- and CHR playlists -- turn to sludge soon after the change? Downloading was in its infancy in 1992, yet that year you had marathon stays at No. 1 for "End of the Road," "Jump" and "I Will Always Love You," and it only got worse in succeeding years. Was SoundScan behind the ultra-conservatism of CHR programmers in those early years, or was some other factor at work?

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Seems like nearly every #1 song since then is on top for 6, 8, 10 to 14 weeks. This was never the case before the methodology change. How can a mediocre, crappy song like "Work" by Rihanna, tie the Beatles "Hey Jude" at nine weeks?? Something is just not right here. And that's just one example. I could list dozens more.

DavidEduardo said:

In the 90's we had the peak years of music tests and callout, as radio was doing very well and research was liberally budgeted. The first thing callout teaches is not to move the songs too fast.

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The other thing going on at the time was the recognition that new songs take a long time to have an impact on an audience. I remember a study that showed that just as a song was peaking in the charts, it was starting to have an impact on the target audience. Obviously a good thing for artists and songwriters, but it slowed down the chart. So there's also something known as Recurrent rotation, where songs are taken off the currents chart, but moved to the Recurrent chart for 6 months or more. For Mediabase, that happens after a song loses its bullet for two successive weeks. I think BDS makes this move even sooner. That way radio can keep popular songs in active rotation without slowing down the currents chart.

What we've found is that Recurrent play along with Power Gold (which is where the recurrents go next) will help determine the recognition factor for songs in music tests, and also how the pick their favorites in personal playlists. It's more about long term airplay than the time a song is in the currents chart. There are a lot of songs that never go the full distance in recurrent and power gold. Once their active chart run is done, we never hear them again. There are a lot of those songs that even one year later disappear from memory. You'd be surprised how many.

TheBigA said:

There are a lot of songs that never go the full distance in recurrent and power gold. Once their active chart run is done, we never hear them again. There are a lot of those songs that even one year later disappear from memory. You'd be surprised how many.

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And it's probably due to this, that these lost songs are never heard from again on classic hits, years later unless they happen to test well again for some reason. It makes me cringe, but I guess that's how it is in your industry.