Billboard in 2018 will give songs played on paid streaming services more weight, but why?

[Shawn Knight]

Charting the popularity of music used to be relatively straightforward as the only two metrics to consider were physical retail sales and radio airplay. These days, things aren’t nearly as clear-cut as listeners consume music across multiple platforms.

Whether analyzing from an access perspective, a user-control perspective, a revenue perspective or from a fraud-protection perspective, a lot has changed.

To better reflect the evolution of modern music delivery, Billboard has decided to implement changes on how it factors streaming music into its charts.

At present, Billboard has two types of streaming “plays” it uses for the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart: on-demand (like Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube) and programmed (think Pandora and Slacker Radio). The former carries a greater weight in the charts.

Starting next year, songs played on paid subscription-based services such as Amazon Music and Apple Music will be given more weight in chart calculations versus plays on purely ad-supported services or tiers.

Billboard notes that streaming, along with all-genre radio airplay and digital songs sales data, make up the three metrics of the Hot 100’s methodology. The Billboard 200, meanwhile, will include two tiers of on-demand audio streams – paid subscription audio streams and ad-supported audio streams.

While I commend Billboard for keeping their chart models fresh, I’m not sure I really grasp why a song listened to with a paid account is somehow more important than the same song heard through, say, Spotify’s free tier. After all, it’s the exact same song. If anything, it gives music labels a valid reason to push companies like Spotify to do away entirely with ad-supported tiers. Maybe that’s the overall, underlying goal here?

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https://www.techspot.com/news/71508-billboard-2018-give-songs-played-paid-streaming-services.html

 

[EClyde]

Because it is what people want to hear or are listening to. AM Radio from the 50's and 60's BABY! WKNR Keener 13

 

[psycros]

Because it is what people want to hear or are listening to. AM Radio from the 50's and 60's BABY! WKNR Keener 13

Exactly. You can't fully customize free or ad-supported streams AFAIK. On-demand playlists are about as specific a measure of popularity as you can get. Even Pandora which used to let you play tunes only from a single band doesn't seem to offer that now. The typical "play msuic like.." option really only measures sub-genre or style popularity which might be useful to build-a-band producers or even station programmers, but not recording execs.

 

[mbrowne5061]

You're still thinking of 'programmed' when you talk about Pandora. "Ad-support on-demand" refers to Spotify's free tier and the similar.

By splitting the rating weights for on-demand streaming between free and paid, Billboard accomplishes two things:
1) Gives a greater relative weight to programmed streaming like Pandora, encouraging artists to release [payola] there if they want a better shot at getting a higher ranking song.
2) 'Splits the vote' for On Demand streaming weights, helping to suppress ratings coming from either tier, but especially from the loss-leading free tiers.

I used to work in radio industry, and none of this surprises me. Billboard being one of the more corrupt companies in the industry has always been an open secret. It is always about the money in the music industry. Payolla is supposed to be dead, but it is very much alive and well - just harder to spot since they package it like cable (good bundled with bad, forcing you to play one if you want the other). Some songs are more expensive to produce, and require more plays to turn a profit. These songs are nearly always made by the super star artists, who are using the most-expensive-everything - but sometimes they are made by the manufactured pop stars (famous-for-being-famous people who can kinda-sorta hold a note). But with the rise of digital distribution and on-demand streaming, the much cheaper Indie artists (be them truly independent or "Indie") who appear less often on on-demand networks are now eating away play counts of these more expensive artists.

 

[EClyde]

The only way to enjoy music these days is to download the songs I like. Some I hear in a movie and think, I remember that then I go out and get it. The newest song I went out and got was "When I'm gone" and that ain't new anymore. Most newer music is terrible

 

[Reachable]

Hard to understand indeed. One thing that does make sense, though, is the photo at the top of the article. All those great songs, and that's only part of the document.