Billboard Hot 100: all about money and popularity?
Since its creation in 1958 by the eponymous magazine, the Billboard Hot 100 has become the standard weekly record chart in the US. Based on sales, radio play and online streaming in the US, this ranking values popularity and profit.
This profit-making and popularity-oriented ranking system is ambiguous and hard to grasp, as it is highly interactive and interrelated to the audience’s preferences. Let me explain. If the ranking relies on sales, radio play and online streaming, it means that it primarily depends on the audience’s tastes, as they are the one consuming and purchasing t he musical content. However, the mass audience’s opinion is, by the moment they purchase a song, already influenced by the charts that gives them a directional on what to listen. This mechanism creates a sort of loop where the charts influence the audience who then influences the charts.
In this case, we can observe that the commodification of musical content can lead to what Noelle-Neumann introduces as the ‘narrowing process’. This concept illustrates how the interaction between cultural industry practices and public opinion leads to a constant narrowing range of opinions displayed, due to pressures of social conformity. Applied to the case of the Billboard Hot 100, we can see how media creates a narrowing of opinion by redirecting the audience towards a certain musical content they want them to hear.
However, Noelle-Neumann mentions how his process leads to a ‘spiral of silence’ that triggers a homogenisation of the visible content; the idea of mass is well depicted in this spiral where popular content is offered to the mass audience who is satisfied by this content and therefore promotes it by consuming it; it is a never-ending loop that promotes a specific, homogenised musical content, while keeping the rest quiet.
The issue of conformity and standardisation arises; if only a certain kind of music is visible to the audience, a huge amount of eclectic and good-quality music is kept quiet; the problem of commodification of culture here is that music becomes a standardised content and diversity and difference don’t prevail anymore. If the artists on the Hot 100 are the one who receive the attention and the funds, they are the one who will most likely have the means to keep making music. This spiral widens the gap between heard and unheard musicians and reinforces the narrowing process of musical content. In this light, music rankings are a thought-through process that media companies use to divulge a certain content that will benefit to them the most. Audience, content and media companies are closely interrelated and interact in some ways that keep this spiral of selectivity going by creating a mainstream content.
‘The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones.’ (Adorno, 1941)
Furthermore, in this ranking system, ‘quality’ means ‘sales’ and ‘popularity’ rather than actual musical value such as lyrics, instrumental quality, rhythm and musicality and so on. The industrialisation of music, where a song is now a ‘product’ made to be sold, has dual consequences; even though it’s an opportunity for artists to make profit from their music, it can lead to the standardisation of content. The risk of this mechanism where content end up being highlighted because it reaches the widest audiences – and is, therefore, in economic terms, the most profitable – is high: no musical content that diverts from this ‘pattern’ established by popular media platforms such as Billboard would therefore be brought up to the audience.
Even though profit is necessary to the music industry in order to keep producing musical content, and even though popularity rankings are inevitable, the system of ranking itself could rely on a more diverse system of ranking where talented but less promoted artist would have a chance of gaining more recognition for their work.