| It wasn’t like pure corruption so much as mass delusion. |
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Future sounds: Pioneering electronic composer/musician Daphne Oram in her home studio, Kent, England, Feb. 5, 1962.
(Daily Herald Archive/National Science and Media Museum/Getty Images)
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“It wasn’t like pure corruption so much as mass delusion.”
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Scanners
I remember exactly where I was 30 years ago, when the May 25, 1991, edition of BILLBOARD's TOP POP ALBUMS chart showed up on unsuspecting desks across the US (which, magazines being magazines, was actually a few days before May 25, 1991, so let's call it 30 years and three or four days ago). I was in a cubicle toward the back of the ASBURY PARK PRESS newsroom, gazing in wide-eyed wonder at a strange, incongruous collection of names—GARTH BROOKS! LUTHER VANDROSS! EXTREME! YANNI! PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: HIGHLIGHTS!—and slowly, awkwardly trying to form the thought that would eventually reach the accessible part of my brain: "Oh! This is what people are listening to!" (A second thought was simultaneously forming—"And this is what people aren't listening to!"—but no need to drag the ROLLING STONES or FISHBONE, both of whom I like quite a bit, into this discussion 30 years later.) This is a great piece by the Ringer's ROB HARVILLA on the music industry revolution instigated by SOUNDSCAN, the startup whose data began powering the albums chart that day. And it was very much a revolution. "Magazine covers, TV bookings, arena tours, and the other spoils of media attention and music-industry adulation," Harvilla writes, changed "virtually overnight." Careers were made and unmade.
And all that had changed was that, after years of relying on the self-reporting of record stores to determine what music people were buying, Billboard and SoundScan had started looking at actual data: which UPC codes were being rung up in which stores' cash registers. In practice, it meant that instead of reflecting what retailers and record companies wanted to be popular, the chart was now reflecting what actually was popular (with caveats about SoundScan's own biases and reach; but it was at least a giant leap in the right direction). The capitalized names in the previous paragraph register today as early '90s mainstream pop, more or less. But that's not necessarily how they registered back then. Pop radio wasn't exactly jumping on Garth or Luther or Yanni records, and record company marketing departments—different departments for each of those artists—hadn't been planning for their slow, steady rise to #1 on the Billboard chart. They register as pop today because SoundScan told us they were popular back then.
SoundScan told us metal sells, and country sells, and hip-hop sells. Even still, there was industry resistance to the idea that hip-hop could truly sell, veteran writer and editor DANYEL SMITH tells Harvilla—"a quiet resistance to the facts"—but the sheer power of numbers eventually made hip-hop's impact impossible to ignore. Within weeks of SoundScan's debut, N.W.A hit #1 on the albums chart for the first time, and many more hip-hop artists would soon bum rush the same show.
"DATA!," BOB LEFSETZ screams in capital letters in the first paragraph of a long essay dated May 25, 2021, which isn’t about SoundScan; he's writing about a music industry three decades later that's taking its cues, and getting its data, from places like TIKTOK and YOUTUBE. Some of the layers between artist and fan have been stripped away and some of the rules of how to catch that fan's attention have changed. But the revolution, at heart, has not. Record companies are still fighting for the right to tell us what to listen to, and still losing because all they can really do, at the end of the day, is take what we're already listening to, give it a boost and reissue and repackage it back to us. Whether it's TEEJAYX6 on TikTok or Garth Brooks or (OK, I should mention who had the #1 album on May 25, 1991, even if the Ringer's Rob Harvilla does not) MICHAEL BOLTON in the racks at TOWER RECORDS, it's the fans who'll always be there to tell us who and what comes next. And all the industry has ever really had to do was listen, and learn.
Green NFT Deal?
A startup called ONEOF will launch in June with what it says are environment-friendly NFTs aimed at the music community. OneOf is designed to sell tokens in editions of between one and 100,000—that is, anywhere from a single, unique artwork for one buyer to 100,000 concert tickets or copies of a song for 100,000 buyers—with an eye toward both affordability and environmental cleanliness. Co-founder LIN DAI tells Rolling Stone the company's tokens will live on a platform that uses vastly less energy than existing tokens; a single transaction, he claims, will use up no more energy than sending a tweet. (Disclaimer: I don't understand the tech stuff behind this.) JOHN LEGEND, CHARLIE PUTH, DOJA CAT, JACOB COLLIER and G-EAZY are among the artists expected to have tokens for sale at launch.
Rest in Peace
Rock and country songwriter DEWAYNE BLACKWELL, best known as co-writer of "Friends in Low Places" for Garth Brooks... Tony-winning actor SAMUEL E. WRIGHT, who sang "Under the Sea" and "Kiss the Girl" as Sebastian the Crab in the film "The Little Mermaid" and played Dizzy Gillespie in Clint Eastwood's film "Bird."
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| time, love and tenderness |
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The Ringer |
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| How SoundScan Changed Everything We Knew About Popular Music |
| by Rob Harvilla |
| Thirty years ago, Billboard changed the way it tabulated its charts, turning the industry on its head and making room for genres once considered afterthoughts to explode in the national consciousness. |
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VICE |
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| A Year Ago, the ‘Big Three’ Record Companies Pledged $225 Million to Racial Justice. Where Did It Go? |
| by Drew Schwartz |
| Universal, Sony, and Warner have paid out just a portion of the money they promised to give, VICE found--revealing a disconnect between how they’ve publicly characterized their donations and what’s really happening behind the scenes. |
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Pitchfork |
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| The History of Pitchfork’s Reviews Section in 38 Reviews |
| by Ryan Dombal, Anna Gaca, Jayson Greene... |
| The formative pieces from our first 25 years. |
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Money 4 Nothing |
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| Can Fugazi help us imagine a better future for music? |
| by Saxon Baird and Sam Backer |
| Ever since they appeared in the late '80s, the legendary D.C. rock band Fugazi has stood as the absolute pinnacle of stick-to-your-guns DIY success. But what can their way of running a band teach us in the utterly transformed and technologically-driven musical landscape of the 2020s? More than you might think. |
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The New York Times |
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| Black Midi’s Music Embraces the Extremes |
| by Jon Pareles |
| For its second album, the British band got louder - and quieter, too. |
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Vulture |
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| Just the Two of Us |
| by Craig Jenkins |
| On their new album, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker recommit. |
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Lefsetz Letter |
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| Today’s Music Business |
| by Bob Lefsetz |
| The song is irrelevant, it’s all about THE DATA! |
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The Daily Beast |
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| The Musical Puppetmaster Behind ‘American Idol’ on Claudia Conway and a Close Call With Disaster |
| by Cheyenne Roundtree |
| Kristopher Pooley is the man behind the music on “American Idol,” helping hopeful contestants--including Claudia Conway--come up with show-stopping performances, and dodging disaster. |
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Miranda Reinert |
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| On orgcore: the worst genre name since skramz |
| by Miranda Reinert |
| In which I define what orgcore is for my fellow under 30s and discuss how the internet has changed in the last 10 years. |
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Highsnobiety |
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| How Hyperspeed Squeals & Alien Whispers Became Rap’s Final Frontier |
| by Kieran Press-Reynolds |
| Nowadays, listening to new rap music can feel like stumbling into a neonatal intensive care unit. We take a dive into hip-hop's new frontier. |
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Variety |
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| Eurovision Winners Måneskin Talk ‘Offensive’ Drug Accusations, and Bringing Italian Rock to the World |
| by Nick Vivarelli |
| Any artist who wins the Eurovision song contest is guaranteed to make a big splash - but Italian glam-rock band Måneskin, which won the 65th edition of the competition late last week, made an even bigger impression than they'd intended. |
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FLOOD Magazine |
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| Can’s Irmin Schmidt on the Band’s Legacy and Most Memorable Live Shows |
| by A.D. Amorosi |
| Germany’s beloved experimentalists get to the heart of their art with a series of never-before-released live albums kicking off this Friday (May 28). |
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Los Angeles Times |
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| Twirl, shimmy, repeat: The post-lockdown rebirth of L.A. concert staple the 'Dancing Man' |
| by Randall Roberts |
| Night after night, for nearly 50 years, Howard Mordoh had been a boogying staple of the L.A. concert scene. Then the pandemic struck. |
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Refinery29 |
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| Joyce Wrice Owns Her Music Masters -- And You Can, Too |
| by Laurise McMillian |
| Recording artist Joyce Wrice talks to R29Unbothered's Laurise McMillian about navigating the music industry. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| ‘In some ways, I think the label model as we know it is dead’ |
| by Dave Roberts |
| How French company Throne Music plans to sign, innovate and partner its way to success in the States. |
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Complex |
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| Lil Wayne Is Still Going Bar For Bar With the Generation He Inspired |
| by Andre Gee |
| Lil Wayne has been rhyming his a** off for so long that he’s now rapping (at a very high level) with a whole generation of artists who he inspired. |
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Chicago Reader |
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| DJ Drip builds his crowd with micro mixes on TikTok |
| by Corli Jay |
| The young East Chicago-born DJ balances business studies at Columbia College with a rapidly growing music career. |
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Pollstar |
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| Suzi Green Of Tour Production Group And Back Lounge: ‘It’d Be Tragic If Things Start Back Up, And Nothing Has Changed’ |
| by Gideon Gottfried |
| Suzi Green is a veteran tour manager who decided to launch a support group for crew that have been out of work for over a year now – a forum for professionals in the same boat. It's called the Back Lounge, and Pollstar reached out to Green, whose more recent tours include PJ Harvey and The Chemical Brothers, to find out all about it. |
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FACT Magazine |
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| Desi on the Dancefloor: Women at the forefront of India’s underground music communities |
| by Mia Zur-Szpiro |
| A documentary by Mia Zur-Szpiro that tells the story of some of the key women working in India's electronic music scene. |
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Billboard |
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| Wherever Did They Go? Why The Calling Disappeared After Delivering One of 2001’s Biggest Hits |
| by Taylor Weatherby |
| "Wherever You Will Go" was a global smash, but overexposure, label drama and a whole host of lawsuits tore the band apart -- a splintering still not mended. |
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| Music of the day |
| "Hood Blues" |
| DMX ft. Westside Gunn, Benny the Butcher and Conway the Machine |
| From "Exodus," out Friday on Def Jam. RIP. |
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YouTube |
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From "Exodus," out Friday on Def Jam. RIP.
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| Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech |
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“REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in
everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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| Jason Hirschhorn |
| CEO & Chief Curator |
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