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

But the Billboard singles chart was never a sales chart. It was a sales plus radio plays chart. How is counting streams different from counting radio plays? It's just giving you a more thorough, accurate picture of actual plays because we have new platforms that people are using to access the music. Don't forget, these charts aren't concocted by and for music historians, they're made by and for the industry to track current financial performance. The "single" as a product unit really isn't meaningful to consumers anymore. There's just a universe of songs in the ether for them to choose from. There's no point in measuring consumer behavior based on a unit that no longer reflects consumer behavior or industry practice.

Plus, it's a weighted system for Billboard: Billboard Finalizes Changes to How Streams Are Weighted for Billboard Hot 100 & Billboard 200

 

People are certainly streaming more Drake songs in 2018 than they streamed Beatles songs in 1964.

 

but back in the day it was albums sold ... that doesn't even mean they were popular ... many albums ended up in second hand stores.
i tend to agree with a previous poster that there needs to be a separate streaming chart

 

If you care to look at sales vs. streams, I think Billboard still publishes a pure sales album chart. What it tends to reflect is a certain slice of the music consuming demo -- older, whiter with old rockers and catalog rock sales having an outsized impact -- seems to be more wedded to sales than where the bulk of the music consumer are, though Drake's Scorpion is still the #1 album this week on the pure sales chart. In fact, there's often a pretty close correlation between what's on the sales chart and whats on the Billboard 200 with just some of the relative orders of the records flipped.

Sales just don't reflect music consumption -- total sales figures are very low album by album by historic measures, so you can be #1 on the sales chart with 30,000 albums sold in a certain week. Sales without streams doesn't really tell you what's the most popular music or what's the most financially successful music (and more than 50 percent of music industry revenue comes from streaming), which is really what the industry is trying to measure for itself with these charts.

 

Agreed 100%. I never liked Drake and whatever music is on the Top 40 for the past numerous years.

I swear sometimes I feel like an old man yelling at clouds or something.

 

yea i know.
The problem with measuring popularity of style, is all of a sudden everyone is using that style.
It's like all these years of playing that game haven't shown companies or artists, that the majority of the time it doesn't work.
I like your insight into these things, i'm just not a fan of the corporate system ... even before streaming.

 

Yeah, no matter what, the Beatles must win.

 

Well, it's a the music business, everyone is chasing hits and financial success, and everyone chases the style of the day. It's mostly always been like that going back to the dawn of industrial pop music and writers like Stephen Foster writing in the pop styles of the day -- blackface novelty numbers and sentimental parlor ballads. Things are popular because the populous likes them and wants to hear them, and the fashions and styles and popular dance rhythms change generation by generation. But the idea of pop stylists working in the pop styles of the day remains pretty consistent even if the styles themselves change. And then there's always lots of other kinds of music that's being made that's not in the pop style of the day in every era.

 

Is top 100 even relevant?

 

and it just hasn't been the same since Josh left.

 

Relevant to what? Relevant to the people who make music for a living? Sure. Relevant as a measure of the most listened to music on radio, streaming services and via digital downloads at this moment in time? Sure. Relevant as a snapshot of the most popular music of a time and place? Absolutely. Is the music on it "relevant"? Well, sure, relevant to the millions of people who made it popular by listening to it.

 

As a millenial myself (just) I'd say the charts are absolutely no representation of what is going on in music today and I'm amazed to see the charts mentioned so often on this forum. Drake does nothing for me personally but fair play to him but I'd say it means more to the company bosses than it does him as I imagine that's all the charts are there for these days.

I can't speak for what is going on in the states or elsewhere in the world but in the UK at least, the charts have been irrelevant for many years now.

It's no wonder that many people on this forum hate modern music if this is what is being used as a reference point.

 

Good for him. Looks like selling "Pink Moon" to Volkswagen has paid off nicely.

 

It's categorically not true that "the charts are absolutely no representation of what is going on in music today."

Everything on the charts -- and there are lots of different charts: pop charts, country charts, hip-hop charts, jazz charts, AC charts, sales charts, streaming charts, radio airplay charts, on and on and on -- is really music that people are listening to and/or making today (there are catalog charts and catalog records on pop charts so not all of it is contemporaneously made). Those charts and the records on them represent a lot of the most popular music of the day just as sure as the NYT Best-Sellers List represents a lot of the most popular books of the day. And everything that's popular in popular music is popular because millions of people like it today, in the here and now.

There also is a lot of music that is made that's much less popular and which doesn't show up on charts, just as sure as there are books that don't make the Best-Sellers List that will be considered the literary classics of tomorrow.

But that's always the way it was.

 

No, they hate it because every generation thinks their music is the best ever lol.

 

Of all the artists dominating the Top 40 these days, Drake is probably one of the least offensive to complain about in my opinion. Not that I am a huge fan or anything, but just making that classic Timmy Thomas sample into an incredibly catchy track that was came blaring out of every store in the mall buys him a lot of good will in my book. Better Drake than Ed Sheehan or Sam Smith any day.

 

You may be right, but think about this: Lady Gaga in 2010 was THE big thing in music business. Her face was everywhere, as was her music. Now, think about XXXTentacion he has reached twice the top, I think, yet he was -to the general audience- unknown. He never appeared on a tv show, I don’t recall seeing him on awards shows, he wasn’t like, say, Gaga or Katy Perry in 2010 but on the internet he was as huge as those ladies once were. I’m millennial, I just discovered Post Malone when they started to make jokes about how dirty he was, I listened to his music and I just didn’t know any of his!
Maybe it’s demographics, who knows?

 

i know lol
so many good bands turned to trash following a designated style, and often the preferred bpm of the day

 

Fruit pies by Drake!

 

Personally, I've never thought my generation was the best, growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. But I do think that music is better, generally speaking, than what came after it. Always gravitated a lot towards older music though, taking a lot from my parents music. These days I know almost none of the current pop music, but then I also have never liked rap music, except for may be a song here and there from the 80s and 90s.

 

I think every single track from that new Post Malone album entered the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time thanks to streaming.

 

It took this long to break that record? Of course, if the Beatles had the flexibility of today, every track on Meet The Beatles and Beatles Second Album would have been a "single". Would have been interesting to see what would have happened then.

 

Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Motown used to commonly follow up hits with sound alikes. "Heatwave" got followed up with "Quicksand." The followups were rarely the hits that the original tunes were, and are rarely the hits that people remember decades later.

But I look at that new Ed Sheeran album. It's so deliberately designed to fit into the American radio formats. "Shape of You" was a vaguely dancehally CHR dance record with the ubiquitous marimba sound of the moment, "Castle on the Hill" was a nostalgic strummy song for triple-A radio, "Perfect" was a tailor-made AC ballad, and for good measure was done in duet versions with Beyonce for pop and urban AC radio possible crossover, and Andrea Bocelli for extra AC legs. Trash? Yeah, I thought the whole album was a mercenary and cynical and sounded like it. But the record and theses singles were phenomenally successful, so, you know, if the plan was total chart and airwave domination -- and let's face it, if your livelihood is making pop music, that's usually the plan -- well, mission accomplished.

 

Apples and Oranges

 

I'm out of my depth here. These are the only Drakes I know :