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Music Charts No Longer Make Sense (qz.com)
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.
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.
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". ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
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.