Elbows Music Blog Community

He proposes incorporating the passion index into a recommender filter. Make Genius Playlists smarter still. I’m guessing it will happen.

But more, in this week following the $1.92 million jury award in the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset for the illegal downloading of 24 songs (see here, here, here and here), I’m remembering how the big media companies fought the VCR. Then, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Jack Valenti famously said:

http://themoderatevoice.com/36332/music-the-passion-index/

One of the trickier questions I've been trying to visualize is how long pop songs are staying on the charts relative to the past. Are they staying on the charts longer than in the past?

In the chart below, I plotted the total number of weeks charted for all 23,924 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1957 to earlier this year. (In other words, a little dot on the "60" line means there was a song released that week that stayed on the Hot 100 chart for 60 weeks.)

See the heavy dropoff on the 20th week starting in 1991? In an attempt to increase diversity and promote newer artists and songs, Billboard changed their methodology, removing tracks that had been on the Hot 100 for twenty consecutive weeks and slipped below the 50th position. These songs, called "recurrents," were then moved to their own chart in 1991, the Hot 100 Recurrent.

Unfortunately, this shift makes it much harder to compare the last 15 years to the decades before it. In the chart below, I've isolated the effect by only showing songs that reached the top 50.

A couple interesting observations... Looking at the very bottom of the chart, you can see that in the last couple years, it's become very common for a single to appear in the Top 50 and fall out of the Hot 100 within four weeks. Prior to the mid-1990s, this almost never happened.

Also, songs are staying in the Top 50 for far longer than they used to. Unfortunately, I don't have any actual sales numbers to compare to, so it's hard to say if these 30-70 week singles are massive megahits eclipsing the #1 singles of the past, or if it's because the record industry is producing fewer hits than before.

Diversity

Did Billboard's methodology changes in 1991 make the charts more diverse, like they hoped? By looking at the total number of unique songs that have charted yearly, it's clear their changes did nothing to slow the decline.

According to Billboard, the late 1960s were the peak of musical diversity in popular music, with 743 different songs appearing on the 1966 Billboard Top 100. It's fallen consistently since, hitting an all-time low in 2002 with only 295 songs. Since then, it's improved only slightly, with 351 unique songs appearing on last year's Top 100.

One Hit Wonders

I've always thought the 1970s were the decade of the one-hit wonder, but now I have the data to see for sure.

http://waxy.org/2008/05/the_whitburn_project_onehit_wonders_and_pop_longevity/

Researchers used a set of ratings from the LAUNCHcast team at Yahoo! to map artists, connecting those who were rated similarly by a large number of users.

“In the central-right portion of the image is a ‘diffuse’ set of points with some strong connections,” creator David Gleich said. “This region represents ‘mainstream’ music and includes many popular artists.  Immediately adjacent is a set of points that represents ‘indie’ music.  Thus, ‘indie’ music is not as independent as some might like to think.”

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/look_around_you/