Article: Drake breaks Beatles record with 7 of the Top 10 songs on Billboard Hot 100 chart*

Rather, the Beatles can only be defeated by gaming the system.

 

I wonder how the Beatles Rubber Soul would fare if released today? 12 of the top 10 billboard, lol?

 

Which is true, though, right? At least in this case. A record that stood for nearly 55 years until rule changes allow you to put entire albums worth of songs on the charts from streaming. Just a couple months ago Post Malone broke the Beatles record for most simultaneously top 20 hits. All of the sudden all the Beatles records are falling around the same time after 55 years.

 

Cheers for the reply.

Maybe that was the wrong way of putting it as the following was more what I was thinking of when i wrote it out...

as I guess I see things going on and scenes emerging and feel these should be making more of an impact than they do in comparison to what is shown in the charts which, I guess, to quote you again is

Obviously music is all subjective and everyone has an opinion on what should be recognised and what shouldn't and my post was written as more in defence of modern music as there is so much out there to be found and the charts are a poor example of what can be heard as I'm sure you very well know.

 

The rules have to change because the times are changing. We can’t have the rules we had in the sixties because people aren’t buying records anymore, streaming is the big thing now, sorry for The Beatles, but that’s just the way it has to be.

 

Not only have the charts changes, but music industry practice has changed. The "feature" is a ubiquitous part of today's pop music, as is the contemporaneous release of multiple remixes sometimes designed to offer different stylistic versions of the same song to multiple radio formats, so popular artists have multiple avenues to chart hits or to extend the length of a songs time on a chart that weren't common practice years ago.

Chart records are kind of silly anyway, given that weekly or monthly or yearly charts only gives you a snapshot of that moment in that time. But the impact that self-directed streaming by users has on today's charts, as a window into what's most popular now and how people are choosing to access music, is interesting in and of itself to me, without any reference to charts of 50 or 60 years ago (which also were rife with manipulation).

 

Can’t name one tune by him either

 

Ok...just went and listened to Hotline Bling.....and Stereolab needs to be making some money from this song...lol. Sounds a lot like... Refraction from Plastic Pulse...from Dots and Loops album..the middle section..songs like 17 minutes long. Not a rip off but definitely used the staccato...Moog ..organ thingy..

 

yea i have seen it too many times to enjoy.
I like a decent pop tune, but they work better from the heart rather than the marketing office.
To me part of the reason the industry isn't the glowing light it was, is the homogenised, cookie cutter formulae that castrates invention and artistic creation. We all know that there are only eleven regular scale notes and yet a plethora of ways to use them, but when style, tone and rhythm is predetermined by some recent market choice, music dies just a little ... currently i am awaiting the next wave of musical paramedics ready to give the industry CPR, because the body is starting to smell even if it isn't quite dead .... and frankly, that breaks my heart

 

I like pop music and I listen to pop radio sometimes and enjoy some of the hits, though I must admit over the last year or two I've probably veered more to the AC side of pop radio playlists in the US vs. the CHR side. I'm not that concerned with judging whether or not a pop song is "from the heart," I mean I'm not necessarily wedded to the idea that every record is about personal expression. I dunno that "The Way You Do the Things You Do" or "I Second that Emotion" came bursting out of Smokey Robinson's head as deeply personal, from-the-heart expressions, but they're great songs by a great writer of the type they are and I love them.

Like I said, chasing the hot sound has always been part of the pop music universe, but these days it's so easy to replicate certain sounds by using the same plug-ins, or matching beats and grooves by bringing up hits in a DAW and just kind of matching the feel with new tracks (a Pharrell trick), that individual character a lot of time gets homogenized out of the records. Like, I really am not fond of the new Taylor Swift album -- too much woe is me, I'm a celebrity -- but I was once a big Taylor Swift fan. I kinda like "Delicate" from her new album, but listening to that back to back with her earlier records, even putting aside issues of dance pop vs. country, there degree of character and personality in the vocal performances go from distinctive to missing in action. I know she's not and was never a great singer, but it's quite striking, the total elimination of character and personality in the voice and vocal tone and everything. Not sure everything on the Hot 100 today however -- including Drake's records and Post Malone's and Cardi B's -- are so devoid of individualism and personality.

 

Is he that rapper guy who goes to all the Toronto Raptors games?

 

I'm enjoying all the Drakemania! It's gear, man! Oh those screaming hordes of girls!

 

I'm with you here. I would say, very unscientifically, that 2013 was the last year I could absorb what was going on in popular music without much effort.

 

His Boomerang won't come back:

 

And a lot of Timmy Thomas, but he got a co-write.

 

when i say from the heart ... i suppose i am talking about the inner person ... i don't don't mean a song needs to be about "my doggy died" or "i crashed my car today" ... i mean anyone who makes music, and i mean those drawn to it because of some inner thing, not some outer thing ----
(for example - when i realised that i was never going to make it in the industry ... i tried to give it up ... and i couldn't ... it's what i do, irregardless of whether anyone likes it or not)
(the outer things - i want some cash, i want that girl to like me, i want to be a star)
----- if you are making music because of an inner thing, yet merely acting upon the outer, you may make a well formulated song, and someone may buy it.
if you are making music because of an outer thing - all you have is shallow water, so the expectations of actually making anything of value are quite low ... all it is is formula and a video with an appropriate amount of nudity and innuendo to appeal to the teenyboppers that are basically bad music bait.
if you are making music because of an inner thing, and you function from that inner thing, in spit of the outer .... that's when people's heads spin and jaws drop (traditionally)
sometimes i fear we have gotten so far away from real that it will never return

 

I would say that they were barely selling because of the fact that only limited quantities of them were being released. It wasn't that the public had moved on from singles, it's that the record companies just became even more greedy in the 90's and tried to force people into buying albums for one or maybe two hit singles from it. I recall reading more than once in Billboard about how people were going into stores looking for singles of specific songs that were hits on the radio, but were told that a single didn't exist or that their stock had run out. The demand was still there, obviously. Maybe not as much as in previous decades, but also not enough to the point that people had abandoned them.

 

There was a time when the Billboard Hot 100 represented pop single sales and pop radio airplay. Then they "had to" evolve, and thus started changing the rules. Promo-only records were getting played on radio, but couldn't be bought in stores. At first Billboard declared these would not be allowed on the charts. So what happened? Other records that were selling but not getting airplay started dominating the charts. Heavier metal / rock and rap songs starting taking over the charts. Radio stations that were carrying American Top 40 started to rebel, as songs were included that no longer fit the pop playlist. Billboard created several more 'softer' pop charts, and eventually allowed promo only radio songs on the Hot 100. AT40 adapted to use these instead of the Hot 100.

Then came Soundscan for purchases, and computerized Radio Monitor for airplay, for all sales and all airplay across all record stores and radio stations, and the Hot 100 was transformed from being a 'pop' chart into an 'everything' chart. Then they threw in downloads and streaming. And that's the mess we're in. The Hot 100 no longer reflects pop music or pop radio, it's an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink chart. There is no radio station out there that plays all songs/styles of the current Hot 100.

Billboard tried several different pop airplay charts for a while, culminating in the Pop 100 Airplay, but eventually abandoned it. Now they feature pop charts for Mainstream Top 40, Adult Contemporary, and Adult Top 40.

As a side note, the Joel Whitburn Record Research books for Country Singles and R&B singles are now using the airplay charts for their main numbers, with Hot Country and Hot R&B song numbers as secondary. In the opinion of book buyers, airplay charts reflect the true style. I.e., Taylor Swift's rock/pop/rap songs are included on the all encompassing Hot Country Songs chart because she has been declared to be "a country artist", but those songs never get played on country radio.

Question: is streaming really comparable to radio play, or is it more comparable to listening to an album?

I still like my idea: have separate pop singles (limited number of songs per artist) and streaming charts...

It's a zoo. I'm a geezer. Get off my lawn!! And stop comparing old chart accomplishments to new chart accomplishments, they're apples and barbed wire...

 

Oh, yeah, I agree about the inner person. Funny, that newer Ed Sheeran stuff that I'm not crazy about, I suspect a lot of it does to some degree come from the inner person, but the surfaces of the music are just so obviously and deliberately made for market that I find it off-putting.

 

Functions to a user both ways depending on if your a self-selected streamer choosing and album to listen to or even making a playlist of your own vs. listening to service-selected playlists.

 

Are you referring to when they began allowing album cuts on the chart in 1998? AT40 had stopped using the Hot 100 as its source in 1991 when Soundscan came in. Before the inclusion of album cuts in '98, the only promo single I know of to chart was the live version of Phil Collins' "Who Said I Would" in 1991. Still trying to figure out how that charted if there was no commercial single for it.

 

Wow, that guy from Uncharted is doing really well!

 

Or those 60's kids would have streamed the songs they liked and never even bought their albums.

This goes both ways.

 

My feelings as well. Metrics are never going to be perfect but in some ways streaming can be a more accurate representation of listening habits, as that can actually be tracked over time.

The privacy concerns not withstanding of course. Everyone assumes that albums purchased in the past got the same playtime as we personally gave that album, but there's really no way to know that. And people do pay for streaming services so that money has to be divided in some fashion so a % of plays equaling a sale seems like a fair balance to manage that.

 

At 30 minutes per album they likely would've sent every song to the top 20 if they were streaming them. As it is, very few of their album tracks made the charts.