The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Probably aggressive music like punk, heavy metal, and rap is easier to hate; something like New Age just makes people say ‘meh; boring’.

The exception is Christian contemporary, which is hated because it has taken a side in the culture war, much like rap. Punk was quite political as well, but has probably declined because being a masculine white guy isn’t cool anymore on the left.

Replies: @anonymous, @Arclight, @Known Fact

Probably aggressive music like punk, heavy metal, and rap is easier to hate; something like New Age just makes people say ‘meh; boring’.

The exception is Christian contemporary, which is hated because it has taken a side in the culture war, much like rap. Punk was quite political as well, but has probably declined because being a masculine white guy isn’t cool anymore on the left.

Replies: @anonymous, @Arclight, @Known Fact

“Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90% a chance to be in the top ten.”
 

Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Almost Missouri

In the old days, disk jockeys would get bored and play other songs, but I’m sure now MBAs have moneyballed playlists.
 

Replies: @bomag

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Classic rock objectively has a lot of great bands and tunes so I am not surprised to see it up there, but I think there is more to it than that, possibly at a subconscious level. Just speaking personally, it's a relic of what are considered better times - before the massive demographic changes, the culture-wide assault on the lives and values of America's largest (and most important) demographic, a more optimistic and can-do culture. Those of us who are in their 40s or older can actually remember this time or grew up in the afterglow and if you have any awareness at all understand it's never coming back and the new era we are entering is going to be a very difficult one for yourself and your children. Listening to that genre of music is both nostalgia and a form of escapism.

There *was* a better time and our rulers killed it stone dead on purpose. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of current teens and maybe young 20 somethings keep the classic rock/folk Americana/outlaw country genres going strong as a sort of reaction to mongrelized culture they get stuffed down their throats. No doubt academics will note this and start churning out courses and papers on the oppressiveness and white supremacist elements of its popularity, as it overlooks black blues and guitar pioneers that gifted America with this form of music and are not property acknowledged today.

I did take some satisfaction in the hate for rap. It's truly music for retards and it's only positive use is in the gym, and even then I can't take it for long.

Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Goddard, @Anon

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Okay since we're really getting down to this, then let's get down to this.

For the record, I have no real personal interest in gassing on about the Harvard scene, but since:

a) it preoccupies an unusual amount of the Sailersphere's world, and
b) it does occupy a significant amount of the public's time, and given its reach and influence, that is not a crazy matter to attend to; and
c) lots of people, as attested to here, seem to have a really strange almost pathological conception of what actually goes on there...

Let me clear a few things up. Unlike most of you, I actually went there, and I actually made the scene, so lemme tell you how it is.

First things first...

-- You have to understand, it was a different scene decades ago, this would NEVER happen now, but back then I was your prime-A candidate: working-class white-ethnic kid, near-perfect SATs, perfect 4.0 GPA from an elite school, poor-boy scholarship kid, kooky extra-curriculars (I was a well-known underground cartoonist), crazy avant-garde stage director, the works.

-- You can't imagine how much MONEY people threw at me from all over the country: I could have ridden around in a sedan chair at Williams or Stanford, carried by slavegirls who fed me iced coffee and chilled grapes.

-- But when I took a look at Harvard, I saw something different: they offered me not a golden-plated scholarship but a decent fair deal, which included student debt and washing dishes and scrubbing toilet bowls. So, y'know, I accepted.

-- I turned down comfort and security in exchange for hardship and debt, because I knew what Harvard had, which the other schools didn't have: the secret keys to POWER. And they did not disappoint.

There's an inside joke about Harvard: you ignore the professors, and pay very close attention to your fellow students.

It's true. Among the people I studied with, some of the professors were kind of cool (the best one was a graduate-student tutor), but the real gasoline came from the other kids: the most life-changing, mind-expanding experiences I had there all came from other students. They're all household names now, I won't bore you with who they are.

But at Williams, you go around taking some good classes and graduate with a magna;

At Harvard (this really happened to me) you have a pleasant first year and then you get kicked out for being in a drunken brawl and then your House master realizes that you were railroaded and sets you up with a job at MIT designing computer games, and then still as a teenager you co-found an experimental theater company which still exists to this very day, and then you create gigantic psychotic theater productions which gets you a lot of attention in Hollywood.

Like I say, you learn how Power works.

Replies: @onetwothree, @Anonymous, @NotAnonymousHere

The problem with being down so long is that it will start looking like up to you. If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.

 

Old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.
 

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century.

In the past few years alone, a few companies have snapped up music rights related to artists including Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Shakira, John Lennon, and Dire Straits. By acquiring music rights, these companies can reap the money from royalties, licensing, brand deals, and other revenue streams that would have gone to the artist. These contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are millions of songs and artists on various streaming sites. People are overwhelmed. They are going back to the media monoculture of the 20th century.
 

Replies: @Digital Samizdat, @res, @Muggles, @Ancient Mason

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Not Raul, @Joe Stalin

The mirage of rap's popularity: How streaming stats mislead vs. sales and airplay

 

Looking over the top 100 songs for 2020, I was struck yet again by how much rap there is. I've noticed this for the past several years, and figured I was just out of touch with that area of pop music, since I don't listen to rap radio stations, don't know anyone who's really into rap, and don't go to clubs that play rap. Still, it just seemed like a growing presence that was not my cup of tea.

But having studied the seismic shift that streaming has had on the music culture, I can finally make some sense of it. Rap is in fact a niche genre, with a few crossover hits to mainstream audiences. However, the media elites who construct the chart formulas have put their thumb on the scale in order to over-emphasize rap's popularity and influence, at the expense of truly popular genres like pop, country, and dance.

The formal trick they use is giving substantial weight to streaming stats, which do not distinguish between breadth vs. depth of exposure. And popularity is about breadth of exposure across the entire music-listening population, not the depth of devotion among fans who expose themselves repeatedly to the song, as opposed to casual fans who expose themselves to it far fewer times.

So if you too were wondering why there's so much emphasis on rap in the media, you weren't crazy. It's another example of woke representation practices, meant to buy off the "talented tenth" of African-Americans, who get employment in the entertainment sector, and placate the bottom 90% of them with cultural cred -- rather than the entertainment and media elites using their high status to lobby the Democrats into providing desperately needed public goods and services.

 

First, a clarification -- the Billboard charts are a product of the media sector, not entertainment. The record labels produce the music, the artists perform it, and various other channels distribute it to the audience (radio stations, clubs, streaming platforms, etc.). Billboard is more of a trade publication than a cultural commentary one, but it's still part of the media sector, albeit the entertainment-focused media.

So, this is not a case of the production side making a ton of rap songs that nobody wants to listen to. Nor is it the distributors taking a niche genre and foisting it on users of their platforms like YouTube, radio stations, and so on. Those two sides are too driven by the cold, hard laws of supply & demand to attempt to deliver a bunch of stuff that is largely unwanted.

However, the media who describe and comment on entertainment are under no such constraints. Or rather, their supply & demand laws are different because their audience is not listeners of music per se, but readers of music-themed discourse. Their audience wants to read takes, and spit out takes of their own, which is orthogonal to what types of music they enjoy listening to.

It's perfectly possible, then, for Billboard to mischaracterize the state of supply & demand in the music industry, if doing so will satisfy the cravings of discourse junkies. It would be wrong to call this "foisting" their narrative onto the music-listening public, because the typical music fan probably never looks at the Billboard charts. Those who do consume media commentary on music, though, evidently eat up the narrative about how influential rap is, so the media outlets are not foisting the misleading description onto their audience either -- they're just supplying the demand for a certain narrative.

But if you do want an overall accurate picture of what the zeitgeist is like, out of curiosity, just bear in mind that the media chart creators can and do rig the outcome in order to please their target audience above all else. It won't be totally outta whack, since such a picture would not even be plausible, and the audience wants the illusion of reality as well as the ideologically soothing distortions. Still, something to take into account.


* * *


Now, the basic problem. For the 2020 Hot 100 chart, I count 30-some rap songs. Not a majority, but still a sizable share. And to anyone who's been in touch with music this year, way too many. What gives?

Well, the Hot 100 chart is actually made up of several component charts. The three with heaviest weighting are sales of singles (i.e. digital downloads), radio airplay, and streaming plays. As of 2013, these carry weightings of 35-45%, 30-40%, and 20-30%, respectively, and the weightings change week to week.

The shifting weekly weightings is the first obvious sign that the chart creators are using these stats to rig the desired outcome, otherwise the weightings would stay the same in order to judge all songs by the same set of standards. In one week, one weighting will accomplish the goal of maximizing rap at the expense of pop, dance, and country, while a different weighting will be needed for another week, since each week's batch of songs perform somewhat differently relative to one another.

For example, if the sales stats favor pop over rap by a huge amount in week 1, and to a lesser degree in week 2, then the chart-riggers will have to give a lower weight to sales in week 1 than in week 2.

Let's turn to Billboard's Digital Songs sales chart, of which their website lists only the top 75. For the 2020 chart, I count about 10 of the rap songs that are also on the Hot 100 chart, and several others that are not. Scaling that to a list of 100 by sales, that would be about 15-20 rap songs -- in other words, only half as many as actually appear on the Hot 100 chart.

Not only is rap less pervasive on the sales chart, but big hit songs you've been hearing all year do in fact show up, while they're mysteriously missing from the Hot 100 chart. "Kings and Queens" by Ava Max, "Midnight Sky" by Miley Cyrus, and "Stupid Love" by Lady Gaga in the dance genre. "Lover" and "Cardigan" by Taylor Swift in the adult contempo genre. And a slew of country songs I don't recognize because I'm not in the target demographic. Again, that's only for the 75 songs listed on their website; if they had a full list of 100, there would be more staples of the zeitgeist in those genres that were kept out of the Hot 100.

When I looked over the sales chart, it felt 10 times more familiar than what's listed on the Hot 100 chart. And that's not just from what I seek out deliberately -- it's from what I hear in any public place that plays music, what's on while changing radio stations, what's popular on Tik Tok trends, what a popular streamer like Pokimane plays in the background while chatting, what anyone is talking about, what online memes refer to... literally every source of pop culture other than the music media itself.

There is a heavy overlap between the sales and Hot 100 charts, since the big-picture narrative from the Hot 100 chart cannot be totally divorced from reality. Still, it's striking how disoriented a normal music listener -- who doesn't care about woke ideology being reflected in the list -- would get from there being a sizable minority of fake rap songs shoehorned in, and the same number of actually popular dance / pop / country songs erased from the record.


* * *


As for radio airplay, Billboard doesn't list their top 100 songs online, but by genre it must reflect the distribution of radio station listenership size by genre (called a "format"). See Nielsen's overview of the top radio formats at the end of 2019.

There is no dedicated rap or hip-hop format, but they are included under the urban contemporary and (to a lesser degree) the urban adult contemporary formats. So however well those formats do, rap must do worse, since urban contempo (and especially urban AC) also includes a bunch of R&B songs.

Among music stations playing current music, the formats with the largest listenership size are adult contempo, country, and pop, followed by hot AC and urban AC, with urban contempo lagging down with Mexican regional. Notice that this is the opposite ranking of which genres are artificially boosted on the Hot 100 chart.

Even more telling is the fact that Mexican regional does not get over-represented on the Hot 100, despite the potential wokeness cred that the chart-riggers could enjoy from doing so, and despite it being as popular or more so on the radio than rap. However, the cultural commentators and their audiences don't find Mexican culture interesting, other than the food, and they don't feel as strong of a need to "heal historical traumas" or "correct the historical record" by amplifying recognition of Mexican culture today, as compared to African-American culture.

The same goes for the Spanish contempo format, which is about as popular as rap (if not urban contempo as a whole, due to R&B's popularity), and is as popular as alternative. But listening to reggaeton enough to have an opinion on it one way or another, let alone actually dancing to it in a club with thicc-booty Cuban girls, would absolutely mortify the dorky white liberal males who control the music-themed media sector, and make up most of the audience as well.

"Spanish music" is still too dance-oriented and corporeal for it to appeal to the cerebral types who are take junkies and media consumers. There's no pretension in the lyrics about "telling a larger story," "raising awareness," etc., and there's no raw angsty attitude like in modern rap, which in many ways has become the black version of punk -- non-musical angst, verbal focus, and a basic beat without melodic instruments.

When rap is (slightly) more melodic, dance-oriented, and aimed at dudes and dudettes grinding on each other in a club, rather than individuals stewing in angst alone in their room, music media people lose all interest. Suddenly it's just a pretext for animalistic booty-shaking. Like all good cerebrals, they only condone sex-having and lust in music if it's centered around boobs (elevating) rather than butts (sinful).


* * *


That leaves only streaming as the component of the Hot 100 that must be artificially boosting the popularity of rap, and diminishing that of pop, dance, and country. This component reflects all the big platforms -- YouTube, Spotify, et al.

The first problem with streaming is the youth bias: 55% of Spotify users are aged 18-34. And in Nielsen's radio listenership article, urban contempo skyrockets to 4th place in that age group, while Mexican regional and Spanish contempo lag far behind. Giving greater weight to streaming means giving rap more representation compared to pop, country and Spanish-language music.

But there's a far greater distortion that comes from using streaming stats. Billboard uses the total number of plays across streaming media (in the US), which could be a lot of people listening a few times each (a broadly popular fad song), or a few diehards listening to it over and over again (a niche song that will last forever in the fanbase).

That makes streaming unlike sales of songs, where one sale could be listened to one time or one million times -- it's still measuring the song's exposure to just one individual. Diehard fans do not skew the overall results by listening to their purchases many times more than casual fans who bought the same song. Total sales of a song = total individuals exposed directly.

And it's also unlike radio airplay, which takes audience size into account. They use the share of radio listeners tuned into a certain station for at least 5 minutes during a 15-minute interval. If a song is played in that interval, that audience size is about how many people were exposed to the song.

Even if someone tunes into the station and hears that song every day, it doesn't skew the overall results because they aren't adding to the audience size by tuning in every day -- it's roughly the same size from one week to the next. Diehard fans may be tuning in every day, while casual fans only listen some days of the week -- but the total size stays about even because some casual fans who are absent on one day are made up for by other casual fans who are tuning in that day. (And when those casuals tune out later in the week, the casuals who were tuned out earlier in the week show up to replace them.)

So if anything, radio airplay is skewed more by casual listeners than by diehard fans, since the total number of casual listeners is hardly all present on any given day. Thus, the station's listenership is larger than it would appear from a snapshot in time. And assuming some song is a regular in the station's playlist throughout the week, it's reaching a broader audience than it would appear from a snapshot. Like sales, radio airplay measures breadth rather than depth.

The streaming stats could be made accurate by measuring the total number of unique individuals who played the song during a given interval, regardless of how many times they played it. Spotify could do that, since their users have to have downloaded the app and be signed in. But YouTube does not require you to even have an account, let alone be signed in, to search for and play videos. And big hits get in the 100s of millions of views on YouTube (albeit globally), so that is no small problem with aggregating streaming stats across all platforms.

I guess YouTube could try tracking how many unique IPs within the US played a video in a given interval, regardless of number of times played. But they're not doing that.

And the larger point is they don't want to -- it would ruin their goal of over-representing rap in the Hot 100 chart, to construct the narrative of how influential a certain part of African-American culture is in the broader society. Using youth-biased streaming stats, with a substantial and shifting weighting, and measuring total plays rather than audience size, are just the technical means toward the end of narrative construction.
 

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Anon Cubed, @R.G. Camara, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Anon

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

https://youtu.be/C8lrpSk0XYI?si=sMnIPODi6Kv_YFmi

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Corpse Tooth, @Jonathan Mason

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

Solutions.

To lower housing prices, stop immigration and build a HUGE number (tens of millions) of new homes. Then home prices will fall dramatically. You could even offer discount mortgages to married America-born citizen middle-class couples with kids. That'd raise fertility & marriage rates, while making it much more affordable.

Lowering the cost of university education is possible too.

We can have general cognitive tests for generic entry-level positions and specialized tests for the professions (engineer, accountant, pilot, etc.). Then hire the highest scorers, regardless of whether they have a degree. It’s meritocratic, fair, and results-oriented. It’d ensure no discrimination by race, gender, orientation, etc. There are studies that show that standardized test scores are more highly with job performance than any other characteristic. Hiring by test would increase the competence of all the employees hired and ensure that we have the best quality workforce.

This would eliminate the need for people to travel hundreds (often thousands) miles away to some university and live on campus. People could learn the necessary skills & knowledge (for the test for the jobs that they desired) through online classes, community colleges, or self-teaching. This would be far less expensive and more convenient, while eliminating the need to take extraneous classes. Students could also probably finish their studies far more quickly. You could still attend a 4-year university if your parents had the money and you wanted the "university experience," but doing so wouldn't be necessary for most jobs. It's your test score, not credential, that determines whether you get hired.

To summarize, my administration would do the following.

-Stop all immigration.
-Build tens of millions of new homes.
-Offer discount mortgages to America-born middle-class married citizen couples with kids, to boost fertility & marriage rates.
-Hire by standardized test, instead of by college degree.

Simple solutions. Massive societal benefits.

Replies: @bomag, @Twinkie, @guest007, @guest007

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Replies: @kaganovitch, @Almost Missouri, @Vlad III

Solutions.

To lower housing prices, stop immigration and build a HUGE number (tens of millions) of new homes. Then home prices will fall dramatically. You could even offer discount mortgages to married America-born citizen middle-class couples with kids. That'd raise fertility & marriage rates, while making it much more affordable.

Lowering the cost of university education is possible too.

We can have general cognitive tests for generic entry-level positions and specialized tests for the professions (engineer, accountant, pilot, etc.). Then hire the highest scorers, regardless of whether they have a degree. It’s meritocratic, fair, and results-oriented. It’d ensure no discrimination by race, gender, orientation, etc. There are studies that show that standardized test scores are more highly with job performance than any other characteristic. Hiring by test would increase the competence of all the employees hired and ensure that we have the best quality workforce.

This would eliminate the need for people to travel hundreds (often thousands) miles away to some university and live on campus. People could learn the necessary skills & knowledge (for the test for the jobs that they desired) through online classes, community colleges, or self-teaching. This would be far less expensive and more convenient, while eliminating the need to take extraneous classes. Students could also probably finish their studies far more quickly. You could still attend a 4-year university if your parents had the money and you wanted the "university experience," but doing so wouldn't be necessary for most jobs. It's your test score, not credential, that determines whether you get hired.

To summarize, my administration would do the following.

-Stop all immigration.
-Build tens of millions of new homes.
-Offer discount mortgages to America-born middle-class married citizen couples with kids, to boost fertility & marriage rates.
-Hire by standardized test, instead of by college degree.

Simple solutions. Massive societal benefits.

Replies: @bomag, @Twinkie, @guest007, @guest007

"What were they in rebellion against?"

Many of the punk rockers I knew in the late seventies disliked hippies. Rather than elaborate rock operas, they liked simple stripped down music like fifties rockabilly. Sartorially, they looked more like a fifties James Dean, Marlon Brando or Elvis than going around in the elaborate garb the hippies wore.

People now tend to think of Boomers as one group but there was a big gap between someone born in the late forties and someone born in the early sixties. They ended up with very different tastes and even political beliefs. Late Boomers were more cynical and pessimistic. There was a big difference between "All You Need is Love" and "Anarchy in the U.K.".

Replies: @Trinity, @Corpse Tooth

Probably aggressive music like punk, heavy metal, and rap is easier to hate; something like New Age just makes people say ‘meh; boring’.

The exception is Christian contemporary, which is hated because it has taken a side in the culture war, much like rap. Punk was quite political as well, but has probably declined because being a masculine white guy isn’t cool anymore on the left.

Replies: @anonymous, @Arclight, @Known Fact

The mirage of rap's popularity: How streaming stats mislead vs. sales and airplay

 

Looking over the top 100 songs for 2020, I was struck yet again by how much rap there is. I've noticed this for the past several years, and figured I was just out of touch with that area of pop music, since I don't listen to rap radio stations, don't know anyone who's really into rap, and don't go to clubs that play rap. Still, it just seemed like a growing presence that was not my cup of tea.

But having studied the seismic shift that streaming has had on the music culture, I can finally make some sense of it. Rap is in fact a niche genre, with a few crossover hits to mainstream audiences. However, the media elites who construct the chart formulas have put their thumb on the scale in order to over-emphasize rap's popularity and influence, at the expense of truly popular genres like pop, country, and dance.

The formal trick they use is giving substantial weight to streaming stats, which do not distinguish between breadth vs. depth of exposure. And popularity is about breadth of exposure across the entire music-listening population, not the depth of devotion among fans who expose themselves repeatedly to the song, as opposed to casual fans who expose themselves to it far fewer times.

So if you too were wondering why there's so much emphasis on rap in the media, you weren't crazy. It's another example of woke representation practices, meant to buy off the "talented tenth" of African-Americans, who get employment in the entertainment sector, and placate the bottom 90% of them with cultural cred -- rather than the entertainment and media elites using their high status to lobby the Democrats into providing desperately needed public goods and services.

 

First, a clarification -- the Billboard charts are a product of the media sector, not entertainment. The record labels produce the music, the artists perform it, and various other channels distribute it to the audience (radio stations, clubs, streaming platforms, etc.). Billboard is more of a trade publication than a cultural commentary one, but it's still part of the media sector, albeit the entertainment-focused media.

So, this is not a case of the production side making a ton of rap songs that nobody wants to listen to. Nor is it the distributors taking a niche genre and foisting it on users of their platforms like YouTube, radio stations, and so on. Those two sides are too driven by the cold, hard laws of supply & demand to attempt to deliver a bunch of stuff that is largely unwanted.

However, the media who describe and comment on entertainment are under no such constraints. Or rather, their supply & demand laws are different because their audience is not listeners of music per se, but readers of music-themed discourse. Their audience wants to read takes, and spit out takes of their own, which is orthogonal to what types of music they enjoy listening to.

It's perfectly possible, then, for Billboard to mischaracterize the state of supply & demand in the music industry, if doing so will satisfy the cravings of discourse junkies. It would be wrong to call this "foisting" their narrative onto the music-listening public, because the typical music fan probably never looks at the Billboard charts. Those who do consume media commentary on music, though, evidently eat up the narrative about how influential rap is, so the media outlets are not foisting the misleading description onto their audience either -- they're just supplying the demand for a certain narrative.

But if you do want an overall accurate picture of what the zeitgeist is like, out of curiosity, just bear in mind that the media chart creators can and do rig the outcome in order to please their target audience above all else. It won't be totally outta whack, since such a picture would not even be plausible, and the audience wants the illusion of reality as well as the ideologically soothing distortions. Still, something to take into account.


* * *


Now, the basic problem. For the 2020 Hot 100 chart, I count 30-some rap songs. Not a majority, but still a sizable share. And to anyone who's been in touch with music this year, way too many. What gives?

Well, the Hot 100 chart is actually made up of several component charts. The three with heaviest weighting are sales of singles (i.e. digital downloads), radio airplay, and streaming plays. As of 2013, these carry weightings of 35-45%, 30-40%, and 20-30%, respectively, and the weightings change week to week.

The shifting weekly weightings is the first obvious sign that the chart creators are using these stats to rig the desired outcome, otherwise the weightings would stay the same in order to judge all songs by the same set of standards. In one week, one weighting will accomplish the goal of maximizing rap at the expense of pop, dance, and country, while a different weighting will be needed for another week, since each week's batch of songs perform somewhat differently relative to one another.

For example, if the sales stats favor pop over rap by a huge amount in week 1, and to a lesser degree in week 2, then the chart-riggers will have to give a lower weight to sales in week 1 than in week 2.

Let's turn to Billboard's Digital Songs sales chart, of which their website lists only the top 75. For the 2020 chart, I count about 10 of the rap songs that are also on the Hot 100 chart, and several others that are not. Scaling that to a list of 100 by sales, that would be about 15-20 rap songs -- in other words, only half as many as actually appear on the Hot 100 chart.

Not only is rap less pervasive on the sales chart, but big hit songs you've been hearing all year do in fact show up, while they're mysteriously missing from the Hot 100 chart. "Kings and Queens" by Ava Max, "Midnight Sky" by Miley Cyrus, and "Stupid Love" by Lady Gaga in the dance genre. "Lover" and "Cardigan" by Taylor Swift in the adult contempo genre. And a slew of country songs I don't recognize because I'm not in the target demographic. Again, that's only for the 75 songs listed on their website; if they had a full list of 100, there would be more staples of the zeitgeist in those genres that were kept out of the Hot 100.

When I looked over the sales chart, it felt 10 times more familiar than what's listed on the Hot 100 chart. And that's not just from what I seek out deliberately -- it's from what I hear in any public place that plays music, what's on while changing radio stations, what's popular on Tik Tok trends, what a popular streamer like Pokimane plays in the background while chatting, what anyone is talking about, what online memes refer to... literally every source of pop culture other than the music media itself.

There is a heavy overlap between the sales and Hot 100 charts, since the big-picture narrative from the Hot 100 chart cannot be totally divorced from reality. Still, it's striking how disoriented a normal music listener -- who doesn't care about woke ideology being reflected in the list -- would get from there being a sizable minority of fake rap songs shoehorned in, and the same number of actually popular dance / pop / country songs erased from the record.


* * *


As for radio airplay, Billboard doesn't list their top 100 songs online, but by genre it must reflect the distribution of radio station listenership size by genre (called a "format"). See Nielsen's overview of the top radio formats at the end of 2019.

There is no dedicated rap or hip-hop format, but they are included under the urban contemporary and (to a lesser degree) the urban adult contemporary formats. So however well those formats do, rap must do worse, since urban contempo (and especially urban AC) also includes a bunch of R&B songs.

Among music stations playing current music, the formats with the largest listenership size are adult contempo, country, and pop, followed by hot AC and urban AC, with urban contempo lagging down with Mexican regional. Notice that this is the opposite ranking of which genres are artificially boosted on the Hot 100 chart.

Even more telling is the fact that Mexican regional does not get over-represented on the Hot 100, despite the potential wokeness cred that the chart-riggers could enjoy from doing so, and despite it being as popular or more so on the radio than rap. However, the cultural commentators and their audiences don't find Mexican culture interesting, other than the food, and they don't feel as strong of a need to "heal historical traumas" or "correct the historical record" by amplifying recognition of Mexican culture today, as compared to African-American culture.

The same goes for the Spanish contempo format, which is about as popular as rap (if not urban contempo as a whole, due to R&B's popularity), and is as popular as alternative. But listening to reggaeton enough to have an opinion on it one way or another, let alone actually dancing to it in a club with thicc-booty Cuban girls, would absolutely mortify the dorky white liberal males who control the music-themed media sector, and make up most of the audience as well.

"Spanish music" is still too dance-oriented and corporeal for it to appeal to the cerebral types who are take junkies and media consumers. There's no pretension in the lyrics about "telling a larger story," "raising awareness," etc., and there's no raw angsty attitude like in modern rap, which in many ways has become the black version of punk -- non-musical angst, verbal focus, and a basic beat without melodic instruments.

When rap is (slightly) more melodic, dance-oriented, and aimed at dudes and dudettes grinding on each other in a club, rather than individuals stewing in angst alone in their room, music media people lose all interest. Suddenly it's just a pretext for animalistic booty-shaking. Like all good cerebrals, they only condone sex-having and lust in music if it's centered around boobs (elevating) rather than butts (sinful).


* * *


That leaves only streaming as the component of the Hot 100 that must be artificially boosting the popularity of rap, and diminishing that of pop, dance, and country. This component reflects all the big platforms -- YouTube, Spotify, et al.

The first problem with streaming is the youth bias: 55% of Spotify users are aged 18-34. And in Nielsen's radio listenership article, urban contempo skyrockets to 4th place in that age group, while Mexican regional and Spanish contempo lag far behind. Giving greater weight to streaming means giving rap more representation compared to pop, country and Spanish-language music.

But there's a far greater distortion that comes from using streaming stats. Billboard uses the total number of plays across streaming media (in the US), which could be a lot of people listening a few times each (a broadly popular fad song), or a few diehards listening to it over and over again (a niche song that will last forever in the fanbase).

That makes streaming unlike sales of songs, where one sale could be listened to one time or one million times -- it's still measuring the song's exposure to just one individual. Diehard fans do not skew the overall results by listening to their purchases many times more than casual fans who bought the same song. Total sales of a song = total individuals exposed directly.

And it's also unlike radio airplay, which takes audience size into account. They use the share of radio listeners tuned into a certain station for at least 5 minutes during a 15-minute interval. If a song is played in that interval, that audience size is about how many people were exposed to the song.

Even if someone tunes into the station and hears that song every day, it doesn't skew the overall results because they aren't adding to the audience size by tuning in every day -- it's roughly the same size from one week to the next. Diehard fans may be tuning in every day, while casual fans only listen some days of the week -- but the total size stays about even because some casual fans who are absent on one day are made up for by other casual fans who are tuning in that day. (And when those casuals tune out later in the week, the casuals who were tuned out earlier in the week show up to replace them.)

So if anything, radio airplay is skewed more by casual listeners than by diehard fans, since the total number of casual listeners is hardly all present on any given day. Thus, the station's listenership is larger than it would appear from a snapshot in time. And assuming some song is a regular in the station's playlist throughout the week, it's reaching a broader audience than it would appear from a snapshot. Like sales, radio airplay measures breadth rather than depth.

The streaming stats could be made accurate by measuring the total number of unique individuals who played the song during a given interval, regardless of how many times they played it. Spotify could do that, since their users have to have downloaded the app and be signed in. But YouTube does not require you to even have an account, let alone be signed in, to search for and play videos. And big hits get in the 100s of millions of views on YouTube (albeit globally), so that is no small problem with aggregating streaming stats across all platforms.

I guess YouTube could try tracking how many unique IPs within the US played a video in a given interval, regardless of number of times played. But they're not doing that.

And the larger point is they don't want to -- it would ruin their goal of over-representing rap in the Hot 100 chart, to construct the narrative of how influential a certain part of African-American culture is in the broader society. Using youth-biased streaming stats, with a substantial and shifting weighting, and measuring total plays rather than audience size, are just the technical means toward the end of narrative construction.
 

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Anon Cubed, @R.G. Camara, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Anon

Replies: @Tom F., @Sparkon

Replies: @kaganovitch, @Almost Missouri, @Vlad III

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

Disgraced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes could be out of prison several months earlier than expected, according to the projected release date posted by the Bureau of Prisons.

The Bureau of Prisons’ online database currently shows that Holmes’ expected release date from a Texas prison is August 16, 2032 — a slight reduction from her previous release date of December 29, 2032.

It’s her second reduction in less than a year: She previously had her 11-year-and-three-month sentence by about two years last July.
 

Holmes is currently serving out her sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a minimum security federal prison camp that is approximately 100 miles from Houston.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri

Okay since we're really getting down to this, then let's get down to this.

For the record, I have no real personal interest in gassing on about the Harvard scene, but since:

a) it preoccupies an unusual amount of the Sailersphere's world, and
b) it does occupy a significant amount of the public's time, and given its reach and influence, that is not a crazy matter to attend to; and
c) lots of people, as attested to here, seem to have a really strange almost pathological conception of what actually goes on there...

Let me clear a few things up. Unlike most of you, I actually went there, and I actually made the scene, so lemme tell you how it is.

First things first...

-- You have to understand, it was a different scene decades ago, this would NEVER happen now, but back then I was your prime-A candidate: working-class white-ethnic kid, near-perfect SATs, perfect 4.0 GPA from an elite school, poor-boy scholarship kid, kooky extra-curriculars (I was a well-known underground cartoonist), crazy avant-garde stage director, the works.

-- You can't imagine how much MONEY people threw at me from all over the country: I could have ridden around in a sedan chair at Williams or Stanford, carried by slavegirls who fed me iced coffee and chilled grapes.

-- But when I took a look at Harvard, I saw something different: they offered me not a golden-plated scholarship but a decent fair deal, which included student debt and washing dishes and scrubbing toilet bowls. So, y'know, I accepted.

-- I turned down comfort and security in exchange for hardship and debt, because I knew what Harvard had, which the other schools didn't have: the secret keys to POWER. And they did not disappoint.

There's an inside joke about Harvard: you ignore the professors, and pay very close attention to your fellow students.

It's true. Among the people I studied with, some of the professors were kind of cool (the best one was a graduate-student tutor), but the real gasoline came from the other kids: the most life-changing, mind-expanding experiences I had there all came from other students. They're all household names now, I won't bore you with who they are.

But at Williams, you go around taking some good classes and graduate with a magna;

At Harvard (this really happened to me) you have a pleasant first year and then you get kicked out for being in a drunken brawl and then your House master realizes that you were railroaded and sets you up with a job at MIT designing computer games, and then still as a teenager you co-found an experimental theater company which still exists to this very day, and then you create gigantic psychotic theater productions which gets you a lot of attention in Hollywood.

Like I say, you learn how Power works.

Replies: @onetwothree, @Anonymous, @NotAnonymousHere

Then home prices will fall dramatically.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @bomag, @AnotherDad, @res

“Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90% a chance to be in the top ten.”
 

Replies: @The Germ Theory of Disease, @Almost Missouri

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Thanks! I now don't have to watch it.

Replies: @Almost Missouri

The problem with being down so long is that it will start looking like up to you. If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.

 

Old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.
 

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century.

In the past few years alone, a few companies have snapped up music rights related to artists including Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Shakira, John Lennon, and Dire Straits. By acquiring music rights, these companies can reap the money from royalties, licensing, brand deals, and other revenue streams that would have gone to the artist. These contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are millions of songs and artists on various streaming sites. People are overwhelmed. They are going back to the media monoculture of the 20th century.
 

Replies: @Digital Samizdat, @res, @Muggles, @Ancient Mason

Replies: @Corpse Tooth

He ignores the 800-pound gorilla in the room, mass immigration, as well as other 500-pound and 300-pound social pathologies that obviously contribute: e.g., declining IQ, multiculturalism, network cartelization, regulatory capture, and predatory divorce laws that disincentivize family formation and break up families that have formed.
 

Replies: @Harry Baldwin

Then home prices will fall dramatically.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @bomag, @AnotherDad, @res

If you're aged 19-36 and don't own your home, you're probably not reading this in China.

While young people around the world are struggling to get on the property ladder, an HSBC study found that 70% of Chinese millennials have achieved the milestone.

A sizeable 91% also plan to buy a house in the next five years, according to the survey.

The mortgage lender spoke to around 9,000 people based in nine countries.

While China came out top of the pack, Mexico was next with 46% of millennials owning property, followed by France with 41%.

In Malaysia, the US, and Canada, just over a third of the age group have bought a house or flat, while in the UK it's 31%.
 

So how have so many millennials managed to buy their homes?

For sons in particular, it's down to the Bank of Mum and Dad - and underpinned by the marriage market.

Thanks to the One Child Policy, there will be 30 million more men than women looking for a partner in China by 2020.

Chinese parents know their sons' chances of marrying well are materially increased if they own a home.

Dr Jieyu Liu, deputy director of the SOAS China Institute, told the BBC: "It is the custom that husbands will provide a home.

"As young people's wages are too low, the husband's family is expected to take on the responsibility to purchase the property in their son's name, or pay the deposit.

"Many love stories fail to turn to marriage if the men fail to provide a marital house."
 

Replies: @res

https://youtu.be/C8lrpSk0XYI?si=sMnIPODi6Kv_YFmi

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Corpse Tooth, @Jonathan Mason

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

Solutions.

To lower housing prices, stop immigration and build a HUGE number (tens of millions) of new homes. Then home prices will fall dramatically. You could even offer discount mortgages to married America-born citizen middle-class couples with kids. That'd raise fertility & marriage rates, while making it much more affordable.

Lowering the cost of university education is possible too.

We can have general cognitive tests for generic entry-level positions and specialized tests for the professions (engineer, accountant, pilot, etc.). Then hire the highest scorers, regardless of whether they have a degree. It’s meritocratic, fair, and results-oriented. It’d ensure no discrimination by race, gender, orientation, etc. There are studies that show that standardized test scores are more highly with job performance than any other characteristic. Hiring by test would increase the competence of all the employees hired and ensure that we have the best quality workforce.

This would eliminate the need for people to travel hundreds (often thousands) miles away to some university and live on campus. People could learn the necessary skills & knowledge (for the test for the jobs that they desired) through online classes, community colleges, or self-teaching. This would be far less expensive and more convenient, while eliminating the need to take extraneous classes. Students could also probably finish their studies far more quickly. You could still attend a 4-year university if your parents had the money and you wanted the "university experience," but doing so wouldn't be necessary for most jobs. It's your test score, not credential, that determines whether you get hired.

To summarize, my administration would do the following.

-Stop all immigration.
-Build tens of millions of new homes.
-Offer discount mortgages to America-born middle-class married citizen couples with kids, to boost fertility & marriage rates.
-Hire by standardized test, instead of by college degree.

Simple solutions. Massive societal benefits.

Replies: @bomag, @Twinkie, @guest007, @guest007

Then home prices will fall dramatically.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @bomag, @AnotherDad, @res

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

Solutions.

To lower housing prices, stop immigration and build a HUGE number (tens of millions) of new homes. Then home prices will fall dramatically. You could even offer discount mortgages to married America-born citizen middle-class couples with kids. That'd raise fertility & marriage rates, while making it much more affordable.

Lowering the cost of university education is possible too.

We can have general cognitive tests for generic entry-level positions and specialized tests for the professions (engineer, accountant, pilot, etc.). Then hire the highest scorers, regardless of whether they have a degree. It’s meritocratic, fair, and results-oriented. It’d ensure no discrimination by race, gender, orientation, etc. There are studies that show that standardized test scores are more highly with job performance than any other characteristic. Hiring by test would increase the competence of all the employees hired and ensure that we have the best quality workforce.

This would eliminate the need for people to travel hundreds (often thousands) miles away to some university and live on campus. People could learn the necessary skills & knowledge (for the test for the jobs that they desired) through online classes, community colleges, or self-teaching. This would be far less expensive and more convenient, while eliminating the need to take extraneous classes. Students could also probably finish their studies far more quickly. You could still attend a 4-year university if your parents had the money and you wanted the "university experience," but doing so wouldn't be necessary for most jobs. It's your test score, not credential, that determines whether you get hired.

To summarize, my administration would do the following.

-Stop all immigration.
-Build tens of millions of new homes.
-Offer discount mortgages to America-born middle-class married citizen couples with kids, to boost fertility & marriage rates.
-Hire by standardized test, instead of by college degree.

Simple solutions. Massive societal benefits.

Replies: @bomag, @Twinkie, @guest007, @guest007

The problem with being down so long is that it will start looking like up to you. If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.

 

Old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.
 

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century.

In the past few years alone, a few companies have snapped up music rights related to artists including Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Shakira, John Lennon, and Dire Straits. By acquiring music rights, these companies can reap the money from royalties, licensing, brand deals, and other revenue streams that would have gone to the artist. These contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are millions of songs and artists on various streaming sites. People are overwhelmed. They are going back to the media monoculture of the 20th century.
 

Replies: @Digital Samizdat, @res, @Muggles, @Ancient Mason

It's only 18 minutes and it goes quickly, and mostly entreatingly (Galloway is a marketing professor for a reason). And given that it's viewership has doubled with another million-odd views in the last 24 hours, you can get the new hot issues that will infect this election season and beyond at the source now, however mistaken I think his remedies are.

But the real news that I meant to convey with the comment is that the themes any iSteve reader is familiar with are now entering the mainstream (through the TED Talk side door, lol), though they are already being freighted with irrelevant or counter-productive "solutions". So: two steps forward, one step back, and possibly too late in any case, but the iSteve keeps happening.

Replies: @Almost Missouri

"What were they in rebellion against?"

Many of the punk rockers I knew in the late seventies disliked hippies. Rather than elaborate rock operas, they liked simple stripped down music like fifties rockabilly. Sartorially, they looked more like a fifties James Dean, Marlon Brando or Elvis than going around in the elaborate garb the hippies wore.

People now tend to think of Boomers as one group but there was a big gap between someone born in the late forties and someone born in the early sixties. They ended up with very different tastes and even political beliefs. Late Boomers were more cynical and pessimistic. There was a big difference between "All You Need is Love" and "Anarchy in the U.K.".

Replies: @Trinity, @Corpse Tooth

Thanks. Glad to see someone promoting that sort of analysis. This struck me.

“Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90% a chance to be in the top ten.”
 

Replies: @AnotherDad

due to the turmoil in her life
 

Her looks have suffered
 

Replies: @Mike Tre, @Gallatin, @Twinkie, @Reg Cæsar

Then home prices will fall dramatically.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @bomag, @AnotherDad, @res

The huge Boomer population cohort moves through culture like a deer through a python.

While Boomers don't directly buy much music any longer, neither does anyone else.

And what they like also affects their kids/grand-kids who get exposed to this.

A recent Rolling Stones concert tour was mostly sold out. They are pushing 80 now...

So far the only music not to catch on much in the West is Arabic music.

Thank Allah! If you've ever been in a Middle Eastern taxi, you've heard it.

Sounds awful. But I found that eventually I came to tolerate and even enjoy some performers despite the dissonant sounds. Of course I couldn't understand the lyrics. A lot of female singers back in the 70s.

Replies: @Trinity

“Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90% a chance to be in the top ten.”
 

Is “higher ed” really targeted at the bottom 90%? How about aiming a little higher (say 10-50%?) rather than turning college into the new high school?
 

But I agree with your point--even moreso. Really going off for academic study is only really useful for people with the skills/orientation for it. I'd say for today's population, the top 25%ish sounds about right.

What we really need instead of sending half the kids off to college is competency tests where kids can demonstrate what they've got upstairs, basic competency and subject matter competency they can work toward in any manner (self-study, on-line, the library) they choose not just "college". As well as lots of opportunity for technical education in the skilled trades.

Replies: @res, @guest007

Replies: @kaganovitch, @Almost Missouri, @Vlad III

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Not Raul, @Joe Stalin

https://youtu.be/C8lrpSk0XYI?si=sMnIPODi6Kv_YFmi

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Corpse Tooth, @Jonathan Mason

I am surprised how few people say they hate jazz,
 

Replies: @Anonymous, @DenverGregg

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

“Our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top one percent of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a super class of billionaires. It’s to give the bottom 90% a chance to be in the top ten.”
 

Is “higher ed” really targeted at the bottom 90%? How about aiming a little higher (say 10-50%?) rather than turning college into the new high school?
 

But I agree with your point--even moreso. Really going off for academic study is only really useful for people with the skills/orientation for it. I'd say for today's population, the top 25%ish sounds about right.

What we really need instead of sending half the kids off to college is competency tests where kids can demonstrate what they've got upstairs, basic competency and subject matter competency they can work toward in any manner (self-study, on-line, the library) they choose not just "college". As well as lots of opportunity for technical education in the skilled trades.

Replies: @res, @guest007

In fairness, he’s talking about income–i.e. parental income–not test scores. I.e. social mobility.
 

Replies: @nebulafox

due to the turmoil in her life
 

Her looks have suffered
 

Replies: @Mike Tre, @Gallatin, @Twinkie, @Reg Cæsar

but I refuse to believe sex ratios are 70/30.
 

Thanks to the One Child Policy, there will be 30 million more men than women looking for a partner in China by 2020.
 

It sounds as if family formation is just more affordable.
 

In many Chinese cities, the price-to-income ratio for buying a house is between 20:1 and 35:1.

To put this in perspective, in most areas of the U.S., the price-to-income ratio for buying a house ranges from as little as 0.5:1 to 3:1.
 

The average lower- and even middle-class person can't buy a house. Only when both adults are working, and Grandma and Grandpa are living with them too, can an average middle-class family try to buy a house.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad

For about $10 per month, you can listen to literally any music that has ever been recorded.

Using the search option I don't think I have ever not found an album I wanted to hear, with one exception, an album called The Instruments of the Dance Orchestra by Ted Heath and his Orchestra (which is an album that gives a demonstration of each instrument, and contain some nice tunes.)

However there are still at least 20 other albums by the Ted Heath Orchestra, which will be fairly obscure to most people, so I can't really complain--even though he recorded more than 100 albums in the LP era.

Today I was listening to John Coltrane's Crescent, which I can recommend.

The good thing about Amazon Music is that you can play it anywhere that you have an internet signal--assuming that you have a cell phone plan with data--but it can also be associated with Alexa, so you can also give it verbal orders to play a particular kind of music.

PLUS you can also download albums to your phone to play offline when you are driving in areas that do not have an internet signal.

PLUS, since it is associated with Alexa you can also tell it to give you news headlines.

PLUS you can also hook it up to whatever speaker system you have at home.

The overall point being that you can listen to absolutely any music that you choose for a nominal sum without having to tune into a radio station and see what somebody else is playing for you or listen to commercials.

Regarding Steve's points at the age at which people are interested in music and listen to music, it is my observation that people over the age of 60 very rarely listen to recorded music for pleasure. Maybe when driving in the car because of boredom, but not much otherwise.

However from the point of view radio stations, it is probably very easy and cheap to fill each hour with about a dozen automated songs plus commercials and news headlines.

I don't know whether these most popular songs of all time have a lower rate of royalties. Maybe somebody can answer that.

Replies: @DenverGregg, @Jay Fink

I am surprised how few people say they hate jazz,
 

Replies: @Anonymous, @DenverGregg

The problem with being down so long is that it will start looking like up to you. If you are under the age of 30 you may think things are normal. But to someone who has lived 3 decades or more you may notice something odd: we haven’t had a shift like we did in the past. Culture is frozen. Throughout the 20th century we had changes almost every decade. Changes in fashion, in music, in aesthetics, hairstyles, style of comedy, television shows and movies. It sort of felt like someone was directing society from the top down, dictating a big shift every 10 years to something new. A director. If I show you a photo or play you a song from the 20th century, you’d probably be able to guess the decade. It was that clean of a break.

 

Old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.
 

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century.

In the past few years alone, a few companies have snapped up music rights related to artists including Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Shakira, John Lennon, and Dire Straits. By acquiring music rights, these companies can reap the money from royalties, licensing, brand deals, and other revenue streams that would have gone to the artist. These contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are millions of songs and artists on various streaming sites. People are overwhelmed. They are going back to the media monoculture of the 20th century.
 

Replies: @Digital Samizdat, @res, @Muggles, @Ancient Mason

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @Not Raul, @Joe Stalin

So, is your goal to immiserate the old folks by destroying the value of the only asset most of them own and, thereby, also destroy what little legacy their kids will inherit?
 

Replies: @AnotherDad

The issue is not building houses but building houses near jobs. As Steve Sailer has pointed out many times, cities like New York or San Francisco have no more land. And living in a high rise condo is not conducive to family formation.

Replies: @Art Deco

but I refuse to believe sex ratios are 70/30.
 

Thanks to the One Child Policy, there will be 30 million more men than women looking for a partner in China by 2020.
 

It sounds as if family formation is just more affordable.
 

In many Chinese cities, the price-to-income ratio for buying a house is between 20:1 and 35:1.

To put this in perspective, in most areas of the U.S., the price-to-income ratio for buying a house ranges from as little as 0.5:1 to 3:1.
 

The average lower- and even middle-class person can't buy a house. Only when both adults are working, and Grandma and Grandpa are living with them too, can an average middle-class family try to buy a house.
 

Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @AnotherDad

Hiring by potential only works if one can have non-compete agreements so that one can lock in the employees that one is going to have to train.

Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Almost Missouri

Okay since we're really getting down to this, then let's get down to this.

For the record, I have no real personal interest in gassing on about the Harvard scene, but since:

a) it preoccupies an unusual amount of the Sailersphere's world, and
b) it does occupy a significant amount of the public's time, and given its reach and influence, that is not a crazy matter to attend to; and
c) lots of people, as attested to here, seem to have a really strange almost pathological conception of what actually goes on there...

Let me clear a few things up. Unlike most of you, I actually went there, and I actually made the scene, so lemme tell you how it is.

First things first...

-- You have to understand, it was a different scene decades ago, this would NEVER happen now, but back then I was your prime-A candidate: working-class white-ethnic kid, near-perfect SATs, perfect 4.0 GPA from an elite school, poor-boy scholarship kid, kooky extra-curriculars (I was a well-known underground cartoonist), crazy avant-garde stage director, the works.

-- You can't imagine how much MONEY people threw at me from all over the country: I could have ridden around in a sedan chair at Williams or Stanford, carried by slavegirls who fed me iced coffee and chilled grapes.

-- But when I took a look at Harvard, I saw something different: they offered me not a golden-plated scholarship but a decent fair deal, which included student debt and washing dishes and scrubbing toilet bowls. So, y'know, I accepted.

-- I turned down comfort and security in exchange for hardship and debt, because I knew what Harvard had, which the other schools didn't have: the secret keys to POWER. And they did not disappoint.

There's an inside joke about Harvard: you ignore the professors, and pay very close attention to your fellow students.

It's true. Among the people I studied with, some of the professors were kind of cool (the best one was a graduate-student tutor), but the real gasoline came from the other kids: the most life-changing, mind-expanding experiences I had there all came from other students. They're all household names now, I won't bore you with who they are.

But at Williams, you go around taking some good classes and graduate with a magna;

At Harvard (this really happened to me) you have a pleasant first year and then you get kicked out for being in a drunken brawl and then your House master realizes that you were railroaded and sets you up with a job at MIT designing computer games, and then still as a teenager you co-found an experimental theater company which still exists to this very day, and then you create gigantic psychotic theater productions which gets you a lot of attention in Hollywood.

Like I say, you learn how Power works.

Replies: @onetwothree, @Anonymous, @NotAnonymousHere

Replies: @Ron Mexico, @Jay Fink

The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants ever to get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth.
 

Replies: @Almost Missouri, @JohnnyWalker123, @Peter Akuleyev, @Anonymous, @Sebastian Hawks, @Twinkie, @E. Rekshun, @AnotherDad, @res, @guest007, @Frau Katze

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

It’s not just the US. It’s just as bad if not worse in Canada. Young people cannot afford to buy a home — and now they can’t even afford to rent.

Adult children living with parents is becoming common.

Thanks to massive immigration there are shortages of all sorts and the opposition Conservative Party actually mentioned immigration in their latest email.

Replies: @Cagey Beast

Wasn't punk always for skinny, no-muscles white kids? What were they in rebellion against?

Replies: @SFG, @Mark G., @Trinity, @Vlad III, @Gary in Gramercy, @Jay Fink

res, you and YAA are both trotting out stories that are several years old. The Chinese real estate bubble has popped.

Also, not sure why you're using the whole population and trotting out 2.2% sex gap?

It's self-evident from your pop-pyramid that the sex gap is running around 10% in the relevant family formation years.

30-35: 4.3 -- 3.9
25-30: 3.3 -- 2.9
20-25: 3.0 -- 2.6

but it's even worse than that because men marry younger women and the younger cohorts--below 35 at least--are smaller. A 33 year old Chinese dude settled into a career and trying to court say a 28 year old woman is looking at a cohort gap (4.3 -- 2.9) of over a quarter. Imagine how entitled the girls get with that? Youch!

The one positive: this should be eugenic. The downside: lots of single men around is not a recipe for social peace.

The Chinese are boneheads. While frontline--"we've got to reduce our population growth!"--understandable, the math here was very very basic, and the social effects very predictable. The correction should have come at least a couple decades earlier in the 90s--2 children with eugenic "high quality" exemptions for more.

Then again the Chinese stupidity pales beside the "must have immigration!" inanity of West, much less the full on Maoist level "screw Americans!" open border of the "Biden Administration".

Replies: @SFG, @YetAnotherAnon, @res

Replies: @Ron Mexico, @Jay Fink

there is also a general cultural wall with very few things from before the early 80s making any kind of appearance today, following my ideas about peak cultural output being between 1980 and 2000 or so. but this focus on the 80s and 90s leads to the derivative, ever looking backwards alterno timeline we're on now, where media outlets just keep making rehashes of stuff from the 80s and 90s, but worse.

Replies: @bomag

For about $10 per month, you can listen to literally any music that has ever been recorded.

Using the search option I don't think I have ever not found an album I wanted to hear, with one exception, an album called The Instruments of the Dance Orchestra by Ted Heath and his Orchestra (which is an album that gives a demonstration of each instrument, and contain some nice tunes.)

However there are still at least 20 other albums by the Ted Heath Orchestra, which will be fairly obscure to most people, so I can't really complain--even though he recorded more than 100 albums in the LP era.

Today I was listening to John Coltrane's Crescent, which I can recommend.

The good thing about Amazon Music is that you can play it anywhere that you have an internet signal--assuming that you have a cell phone plan with data--but it can also be associated with Alexa, so you can also give it verbal orders to play a particular kind of music.

PLUS you can also download albums to your phone to play offline when you are driving in areas that do not have an internet signal.

PLUS, since it is associated with Alexa you can also tell it to give you news headlines.

PLUS you can also hook it up to whatever speaker system you have at home.

The overall point being that you can listen to absolutely any music that you choose for a nominal sum without having to tune into a radio station and see what somebody else is playing for you or listen to commercials.

Regarding Steve's points at the age at which people are interested in music and listen to music, it is my observation that people over the age of 60 very rarely listen to recorded music for pleasure. Maybe when driving in the car because of boredom, but not much otherwise.

However from the point of view radio stations, it is probably very easy and cheap to fill each hour with about a dozen automated songs plus commercials and news headlines.

I don't know whether these most popular songs of all time have a lower rate of royalties. Maybe somebody can answer that.

Replies: @DenverGregg, @Jay Fink

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Barnard, @bomag, @Anonymous, @tr, @Reg Cæsar, @Anonymous, @Tom F.

Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,”
 

These days’ [sic] radio stations seem to play each band’s most popular song vastly more often than even it’s [sic] second most popular song.
 

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous, @Captain Tripps

Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,”
 

These days’ [sic] radio stations seem to play each band’s most popular song vastly more often than even it’s [sic] second most popular song.
 

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous, @Captain Tripps

The mirage of rap's popularity: How streaming stats mislead vs. sales and airplay

 

Looking over the top 100 songs for 2020, I was struck yet again by how much rap there is. I've noticed this for the past several years, and figured I was just out of touch with that area of pop music, since I don't listen to rap radio stations, don't know anyone who's really into rap, and don't go to clubs that play rap. Still, it just seemed like a growing presence that was not my cup of tea.

But having studied the seismic shift that streaming has had on the music culture, I can finally make some sense of it. Rap is in fact a niche genre, with a few crossover hits to mainstream audiences. However, the media elites who construct the chart formulas have put their thumb on the scale in order to over-emphasize rap's popularity and influence, at the expense of truly popular genres like pop, country, and dance.

The formal trick they use is giving substantial weight to streaming stats, which do not distinguish between breadth vs. depth of exposure. And popularity is about breadth of exposure across the entire music-listening population, not the depth of devotion among fans who expose themselves repeatedly to the song, as opposed to casual fans who expose themselves to it far fewer times.

So if you too were wondering why there's so much emphasis on rap in the media, you weren't crazy. It's another example of woke representation practices, meant to buy off the "talented tenth" of African-Americans, who get employment in the entertainment sector, and placate the bottom 90% of them with cultural cred -- rather than the entertainment and media elites using their high status to lobby the Democrats into providing desperately needed public goods and services.

 

First, a clarification -- the Billboard charts are a product of the media sector, not entertainment. The record labels produce the music, the artists perform it, and various other channels distribute it to the audience (radio stations, clubs, streaming platforms, etc.). Billboard is more of a trade publication than a cultural commentary one, but it's still part of the media sector, albeit the entertainment-focused media.

So, this is not a case of the production side making a ton of rap songs that nobody wants to listen to. Nor is it the distributors taking a niche genre and foisting it on users of their platforms like YouTube, radio stations, and so on. Those two sides are too driven by the cold, hard laws of supply & demand to attempt to deliver a bunch of stuff that is largely unwanted.

However, the media who describe and comment on entertainment are under no such constraints. Or rather, their supply & demand laws are different because their audience is not listeners of music per se, but readers of music-themed discourse. Their audience wants to read takes, and spit out takes of their own, which is orthogonal to what types of music they enjoy listening to.

It's perfectly possible, then, for Billboard to mischaracterize the state of supply & demand in the music industry, if doing so will satisfy the cravings of discourse junkies. It would be wrong to call this "foisting" their narrative onto the music-listening public, because the typical music fan probably never looks at the Billboard charts. Those who do consume media commentary on music, though, evidently eat up the narrative about how influential rap is, so the media outlets are not foisting the misleading description onto their audience either -- they're just supplying the demand for a certain narrative.

But if you do want an overall accurate picture of what the zeitgeist is like, out of curiosity, just bear in mind that the media chart creators can and do rig the outcome in order to please their target audience above all else. It won't be totally outta whack, since such a picture would not even be plausible, and the audience wants the illusion of reality as well as the ideologically soothing distortions. Still, something to take into account.


* * *


Now, the basic problem. For the 2020 Hot 100 chart, I count 30-some rap songs. Not a majority, but still a sizable share. And to anyone who's been in touch with music this year, way too many. What gives?

Well, the Hot 100 chart is actually made up of several component charts. The three with heaviest weighting are sales of singles (i.e. digital downloads), radio airplay, and streaming plays. As of 2013, these carry weightings of 35-45%, 30-40%, and 20-30%, respectively, and the weightings change week to week.

The shifting weekly weightings is the first obvious sign that the chart creators are using these stats to rig the desired outcome, otherwise the weightings would stay the same in order to judge all songs by the same set of standards. In one week, one weighting will accomplish the goal of maximizing rap at the expense of pop, dance, and country, while a different weighting will be needed for another week, since each week's batch of songs perform somewhat differently relative to one another.

For example, if the sales stats favor pop over rap by a huge amount in week 1, and to a lesser degree in week 2, then the chart-riggers will have to give a lower weight to sales in week 1 than in week 2.

Let's turn to Billboard's Digital Songs sales chart, of which their website lists only the top 75. For the 2020 chart, I count about 10 of the rap songs that are also on the Hot 100 chart, and several others that are not. Scaling that to a list of 100 by sales, that would be about 15-20 rap songs -- in other words, only half as many as actually appear on the Hot 100 chart.

Not only is rap less pervasive on the sales chart, but big hit songs you've been hearing all year do in fact show up, while they're mysteriously missing from the Hot 100 chart. "Kings and Queens" by Ava Max, "Midnight Sky" by Miley Cyrus, and "Stupid Love" by Lady Gaga in the dance genre. "Lover" and "Cardigan" by Taylor Swift in the adult contempo genre. And a slew of country songs I don't recognize because I'm not in the target demographic. Again, that's only for the 75 songs listed on their website; if they had a full list of 100, there would be more staples of the zeitgeist in those genres that were kept out of the Hot 100.

When I looked over the sales chart, it felt 10 times more familiar than what's listed on the Hot 100 chart. And that's not just from what I seek out deliberately -- it's from what I hear in any public place that plays music, what's on while changing radio stations, what's popular on Tik Tok trends, what a popular streamer like Pokimane plays in the background while chatting, what anyone is talking about, what online memes refer to... literally every source of pop culture other than the music media itself.

There is a heavy overlap between the sales and Hot 100 charts, since the big-picture narrative from the Hot 100 chart cannot be totally divorced from reality. Still, it's striking how disoriented a normal music listener -- who doesn't care about woke ideology being reflected in the list -- would get from there being a sizable minority of fake rap songs shoehorned in, and the same number of actually popular dance / pop / country songs erased from the record.


* * *


As for radio airplay, Billboard doesn't list their top 100 songs online, but by genre it must reflect the distribution of radio station listenership size by genre (called a "format"). See Nielsen's overview of the top radio formats at the end of 2019.

There is no dedicated rap or hip-hop format, but they are included under the urban contemporary and (to a lesser degree) the urban adult contemporary formats. So however well those formats do, rap must do worse, since urban contempo (and especially urban AC) also includes a bunch of R&B songs.

Among music stations playing current music, the formats with the largest listenership size are adult contempo, country, and pop, followed by hot AC and urban AC, with urban contempo lagging down with Mexican regional. Notice that this is the opposite ranking of which genres are artificially boosted on the Hot 100 chart.

Even more telling is the fact that Mexican regional does not get over-represented on the Hot 100, despite the potential wokeness cred that the chart-riggers could enjoy from doing so, and despite it being as popular or more so on the radio than rap. However, the cultural commentators and their audiences don't find Mexican culture interesting, other than the food, and they don't feel as strong of a need to "heal historical traumas" or "correct the historical record" by amplifying recognition of Mexican culture today, as compared to African-American culture.

The same goes for the Spanish contempo format, which is about as popular as rap (if not urban contempo as a whole, due to R&B's popularity), and is as popular as alternative. But listening to reggaeton enough to have an opinion on it one way or another, let alone actually dancing to it in a club with thicc-booty Cuban girls, would absolutely mortify the dorky white liberal males who control the music-themed media sector, and make up most of the audience as well.

"Spanish music" is still too dance-oriented and corporeal for it to appeal to the cerebral types who are take junkies and media consumers. There's no pretension in the lyrics about "telling a larger story," "raising awareness," etc., and there's no raw angsty attitude like in modern rap, which in many ways has become the black version of punk -- non-musical angst, verbal focus, and a basic beat without melodic instruments.

When rap is (slightly) more melodic, dance-oriented, and aimed at dudes and dudettes grinding on each other in a club, rather than individuals stewing in angst alone in their room, music media people lose all interest. Suddenly it's just a pretext for animalistic booty-shaking. Like all good cerebrals, they only condone sex-having and lust in music if it's centered around boobs (elevating) rather than butts (sinful).


* * *


That leaves only streaming as the component of the Hot 100 that must be artificially boosting the popularity of rap, and diminishing that of pop, dance, and country. This component reflects all the big platforms -- YouTube, Spotify, et al.

The first problem with streaming is the youth bias: 55% of Spotify users are aged 18-34. And in Nielsen's radio listenership article, urban contempo skyrockets to 4th place in that age group, while Mexican regional and Spanish contempo lag far behind. Giving greater weight to streaming means giving rap more representation compared to pop, country and Spanish-language music.

But there's a far greater distortion that comes from using streaming stats. Billboard uses the total number of plays across streaming media (in the US), which could be a lot of people listening a few times each (a broadly popular fad song), or a few diehards listening to it over and over again (a niche song that will last forever in the fanbase).

That makes streaming unlike sales of songs, where one sale could be listened to one time or one million times -- it's still measuring the song's exposure to just one individual. Diehard fans do not skew the overall results by listening to their purchases many times more than casual fans who bought the same song. Total sales of a song = total individuals exposed directly.

And it's also unlike radio airplay, which takes audience size into account. They use the share of radio listeners tuned into a certain station for at least 5 minutes during a 15-minute interval. If a song is played in that interval, that audience size is about how many people were exposed to the song.

Even if someone tunes into the station and hears that song every day, it doesn't skew the overall results because they aren't adding to the audience size by tuning in every day -- it's roughly the same size from one week to the next. Diehard fans may be tuning in every day, while casual fans only listen some days of the week -- but the total size stays about even because some casual fans who are absent on one day are made up for by other casual fans who are tuning in that day. (And when those casuals tune out later in the week, the casuals who were tuned out earlier in the week show up to replace them.)

So if anything, radio airplay is skewed more by casual listeners than by diehard fans, since the total number of casual listeners is hardly all present on any given day. Thus, the station's listenership is larger than it would appear from a snapshot in time. And assuming some song is a regular in the station's playlist throughout the week, it's reaching a broader audience than it would appear from a snapshot. Like sales, radio airplay measures breadth rather than depth.

The streaming stats could be made accurate by measuring the total number of unique individuals who played the song during a given interval, regardless of how many times they played it. Spotify could do that, since their users have to have downloaded the app and be signed in. But YouTube does not require you to even have an account, let alone be signed in, to search for and play videos. And big hits get in the 100s of millions of views on YouTube (albeit globally), so that is no small problem with aggregating streaming stats across all platforms.

I guess YouTube could try tracking how many unique IPs within the US played a video in a given interval, regardless of number of times played. But they're not doing that.

And the larger point is they don't want to -- it would ruin their goal of over-representing rap in the Hot 100 chart, to construct the narrative of how influential a certain part of African-American culture is in the broader society. Using youth-biased streaming stats, with a substantial and shifting weighting, and measuring total plays rather than audience size, are just the technical means toward the end of narrative construction.
 

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Anon Cubed, @R.G. Camara, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Anon

Ask Henry Rollins -- preferably from a safe distance.

Replies: @R.G. Camara

Replies: @Tom F., @Sparkon

Rollins seems like he's very tiresome to talk to. Like, you might agree with him on some things, but if you disagreed he'd be constantly screaming at you in your face about it, and just demand total adherence to his current belief. And given his communistic philosophy there's a lot you'd disagree with. Leno had him on once and he seemed to alternate between charming and psychotic (when it came to politics).

Given his muscular physique and wide-eyed aggression it could be quite intimidating in person.

Replies: @Jay Fink, @Brutusale

The other issue, as pointed out by Richard Reeves in his book Dream Hoarders, is that for someone to move into the top 10% financially, someone has to fall out. Given how hard families in the top 10% fight to keep their children in the top ten percent, it is much harder to move up. A blue collar families would be better off thinking in terms of two generations instead of one to make the move.

Replies: @nebulafox

I am pushing 60 and I can't imagine not listening to music for pleasure. I'm an outlier though, I am very much a music person. I listened to music when I was 5 when none of my peers were into it yet and I'll be listening when I'm 65 or 75 when few of my fellow geezers listen to it. What makes me especially unusual is I still listen to and keep up with current pop and hip hop. I enjoy some of it, more so than hearing the overplayed 80s hits of my teenage years.

Replies: @anonymous

Replies: @ydydy

That skinny no muscles look described me (still does) and I was a big punk fan as a teen in the early 80s. Then I went to my first punk concert (Social Distortion in 1982) and the crowd wasn't my fellow skinny no muscle nerds. It was a very edgy, hardcore group of people I couldn't relate to. I knew I wasn't a punk rocker after all. Today most of it sounds terrible to me although I have a few punk songs saved to my playlists for nostalgia sake.

Replies: @Ministry Of Tongues, @Captain Tripps

The mirage of rap's popularity: How streaming stats mislead vs. sales and airplay

 

Looking over the top 100 songs for 2020, I was struck yet again by how much rap there is. I've noticed this for the past several years, and figured I was just out of touch with that area of pop music, since I don't listen to rap radio stations, don't know anyone who's really into rap, and don't go to clubs that play rap. Still, it just seemed like a growing presence that was not my cup of tea.

But having studied the seismic shift that streaming has had on the music culture, I can finally make some sense of it. Rap is in fact a niche genre, with a few crossover hits to mainstream audiences. However, the media elites who construct the chart formulas have put their thumb on the scale in order to over-emphasize rap's popularity and influence, at the expense of truly popular genres like pop, country, and dance.

The formal trick they use is giving substantial weight to streaming stats, which do not distinguish between breadth vs. depth of exposure. And popularity is about breadth of exposure across the entire music-listening population, not the depth of devotion among fans who expose themselves repeatedly to the song, as opposed to casual fans who expose themselves to it far fewer times.

So if you too were wondering why there's so much emphasis on rap in the media, you weren't crazy. It's another example of woke representation practices, meant to buy off the "talented tenth" of African-Americans, who get employment in the entertainment sector, and placate the bottom 90% of them with cultural cred -- rather than the entertainment and media elites using their high status to lobby the Democrats into providing desperately needed public goods and services.

 

First, a clarification -- the Billboard charts are a product of the media sector, not entertainment. The record labels produce the music, the artists perform it, and various other channels distribute it to the audience (radio stations, clubs, streaming platforms, etc.). Billboard is more of a trade publication than a cultural commentary one, but it's still part of the media sector, albeit the entertainment-focused media.

So, this is not a case of the production side making a ton of rap songs that nobody wants to listen to. Nor is it the distributors taking a niche genre and foisting it on users of their platforms like YouTube, radio stations, and so on. Those two sides are too driven by the cold, hard laws of supply & demand to attempt to deliver a bunch of stuff that is largely unwanted.

However, the media who describe and comment on entertainment are under no such constraints. Or rather, their supply & demand laws are different because their audience is not listeners of music per se, but readers of music-themed discourse. Their audience wants to read takes, and spit out takes of their own, which is orthogonal to what types of music they enjoy listening to.

It's perfectly possible, then, for Billboard to mischaracterize the state of supply & demand in the music industry, if doing so will satisfy the cravings of discourse junkies. It would be wrong to call this "foisting" their narrative onto the music-listening public, because the typical music fan probably never looks at the Billboard charts. Those who do consume media commentary on music, though, evidently eat up the narrative about how influential rap is, so the media outlets are not foisting the misleading description onto their audience either -- they're just supplying the demand for a certain narrative.

But if you do want an overall accurate picture of what the zeitgeist is like, out of curiosity, just bear in mind that the media chart creators can and do rig the outcome in order to please their target audience above all else. It won't be totally outta whack, since such a picture would not even be plausible, and the audience wants the illusion of reality as well as the ideologically soothing distortions. Still, something to take into account.


* * *


Now, the basic problem. For the 2020 Hot 100 chart, I count 30-some rap songs. Not a majority, but still a sizable share. And to anyone who's been in touch with music this year, way too many. What gives?

Well, the Hot 100 chart is actually made up of several component charts. The three with heaviest weighting are sales of singles (i.e. digital downloads), radio airplay, and streaming plays. As of 2013, these carry weightings of 35-45%, 30-40%, and 20-30%, respectively, and the weightings change week to week.

The shifting weekly weightings is the first obvious sign that the chart creators are using these stats to rig the desired outcome, otherwise the weightings would stay the same in order to judge all songs by the same set of standards. In one week, one weighting will accomplish the goal of maximizing rap at the expense of pop, dance, and country, while a different weighting will be needed for another week, since each week's batch of songs perform somewhat differently relative to one another.

For example, if the sales stats favor pop over rap by a huge amount in week 1, and to a lesser degree in week 2, then the chart-riggers will have to give a lower weight to sales in week 1 than in week 2.

Let's turn to Billboard's Digital Songs sales chart, of which their website lists only the top 75. For the 2020 chart, I count about 10 of the rap songs that are also on the Hot 100 chart, and several others that are not. Scaling that to a list of 100 by sales, that would be about 15-20 rap songs -- in other words, only half as many as actually appear on the Hot 100 chart.

Not only is rap less pervasive on the sales chart, but big hit songs you've been hearing all year do in fact show up, while they're mysteriously missing from the Hot 100 chart. "Kings and Queens" by Ava Max, "Midnight Sky" by Miley Cyrus, and "Stupid Love" by Lady Gaga in the dance genre. "Lover" and "Cardigan" by Taylor Swift in the adult contempo genre. And a slew of country songs I don't recognize because I'm not in the target demographic. Again, that's only for the 75 songs listed on their website; if they had a full list of 100, there would be more staples of the zeitgeist in those genres that were kept out of the Hot 100.

When I looked over the sales chart, it felt 10 times more familiar than what's listed on the Hot 100 chart. And that's not just from what I seek out deliberately -- it's from what I hear in any public place that plays music, what's on while changing radio stations, what's popular on Tik Tok trends, what a popular streamer like Pokimane plays in the background while chatting, what anyone is talking about, what online memes refer to... literally every source of pop culture other than the music media itself.

There is a heavy overlap between the sales and Hot 100 charts, since the big-picture narrative from the Hot 100 chart cannot be totally divorced from reality. Still, it's striking how disoriented a normal music listener -- who doesn't care about woke ideology being reflected in the list -- would get from there being a sizable minority of fake rap songs shoehorned in, and the same number of actually popular dance / pop / country songs erased from the record.


* * *


As for radio airplay, Billboard doesn't list their top 100 songs online, but by genre it must reflect the distribution of radio station listenership size by genre (called a "format"). See Nielsen's overview of the top radio formats at the end of 2019.

There is no dedicated rap or hip-hop format, but they are included under the urban contemporary and (to a lesser degree) the urban adult contemporary formats. So however well those formats do, rap must do worse, since urban contempo (and especially urban AC) also includes a bunch of R&B songs.

Among music stations playing current music, the formats with the largest listenership size are adult contempo, country, and pop, followed by hot AC and urban AC, with urban contempo lagging down with Mexican regional. Notice that this is the opposite ranking of which genres are artificially boosted on the Hot 100 chart.

Even more telling is the fact that Mexican regional does not get over-represented on the Hot 100, despite the potential wokeness cred that the chart-riggers could enjoy from doing so, and despite it being as popular or more so on the radio than rap. However, the cultural commentators and their audiences don't find Mexican culture interesting, other than the food, and they don't feel as strong of a need to "heal historical traumas" or "correct the historical record" by amplifying recognition of Mexican culture today, as compared to African-American culture.

The same goes for the Spanish contempo format, which is about as popular as rap (if not urban contempo as a whole, due to R&B's popularity), and is as popular as alternative. But listening to reggaeton enough to have an opinion on it one way or another, let alone actually dancing to it in a club with thicc-booty Cuban girls, would absolutely mortify the dorky white liberal males who control the music-themed media sector, and make up most of the audience as well.

"Spanish music" is still too dance-oriented and corporeal for it to appeal to the cerebral types who are take junkies and media consumers. There's no pretension in the lyrics about "telling a larger story," "raising awareness," etc., and there's no raw angsty attitude like in modern rap, which in many ways has become the black version of punk -- non-musical angst, verbal focus, and a basic beat without melodic instruments.

When rap is (slightly) more melodic, dance-oriented, and aimed at dudes and dudettes grinding on each other in a club, rather than individuals stewing in angst alone in their room, music media people lose all interest. Suddenly it's just a pretext for animalistic booty-shaking. Like all good cerebrals, they only condone sex-having and lust in music if it's centered around boobs (elevating) rather than butts (sinful).


* * *


That leaves only streaming as the component of the Hot 100 that must be artificially boosting the popularity of rap, and diminishing that of pop, dance, and country. This component reflects all the big platforms -- YouTube, Spotify, et al.

The first problem with streaming is the youth bias: 55% of Spotify users are aged 18-34. And in Nielsen's radio listenership article, urban contempo skyrockets to 4th place in that age group, while Mexican regional and Spanish contempo lag far behind. Giving greater weight to streaming means giving rap more representation compared to pop, country and Spanish-language music.

But there's a far greater distortion that comes from using streaming stats. Billboard uses the total number of plays across streaming media (in the US), which could be a lot of people listening a few times each (a broadly popular fad song), or a few diehards listening to it over and over again (a niche song that will last forever in the fanbase).

That makes streaming unlike sales of songs, where one sale could be listened to one time or one million times -- it's still measuring the song's exposure to just one individual. Diehard fans do not skew the overall results by listening to their purchases many times more than casual fans who bought the same song. Total sales of a song = total individuals exposed directly.

And it's also unlike radio airplay, which takes audience size into account. They use the share of radio listeners tuned into a certain station for at least 5 minutes during a 15-minute interval. If a song is played in that interval, that audience size is about how many people were exposed to the song.

Even if someone tunes into the station and hears that song every day, it doesn't skew the overall results because they aren't adding to the audience size by tuning in every day -- it's roughly the same size from one week to the next. Diehard fans may be tuning in every day, while casual fans only listen some days of the week -- but the total size stays about even because some casual fans who are absent on one day are made up for by other casual fans who are tuning in that day. (And when those casuals tune out later in the week, the casuals who were tuned out earlier in the week show up to replace them.)

So if anything, radio airplay is skewed more by casual listeners than by diehard fans, since the total number of casual listeners is hardly all present on any given day. Thus, the station's listenership is larger than it would appear from a snapshot in time. And assuming some song is a regular in the station's playlist throughout the week, it's reaching a broader audience than it would appear from a snapshot. Like sales, radio airplay measures breadth rather than depth.

The streaming stats could be made accurate by measuring the total number of unique individuals who played the song during a given interval, regardless of how many times they played it. Spotify could do that, since their users have to have downloaded the app and be signed in. But YouTube does not require you to even have an account, let alone be signed in, to search for and play videos. And big hits get in the 100s of millions of views on YouTube (albeit globally), so that is no small problem with aggregating streaming stats across all platforms.

I guess YouTube could try tracking how many unique IPs within the US played a video in a given interval, regardless of number of times played. But they're not doing that.

And the larger point is they don't want to -- it would ruin their goal of over-representing rap in the Hot 100 chart, to construct the narrative of how influential a certain part of African-American culture is in the broader society. Using youth-biased streaming stats, with a substantial and shifting weighting, and measuring total plays rather than audience size, are just the technical means toward the end of narrative construction.
 

Replies: @Redneck Farmer, @Anon Cubed, @R.G. Camara, @The Last Real Calvinist, @Anon

Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist

I hate that song with a passion. What a nightmare that it's never stopped being played since it was new over 40 years ago. Besides being terribly burned out on it I never could relate to the Jack character.

Replies: @Mike Tre, @Reg Cæsar

If Metal and Christian are so widely disliked, imagine the plight of Christian Metal groups like Stryper. My wife actually thought I was making stuff up when I told her Christian Metal really is a thing, and there's really a song called To Hell With the Devil. I will spare you the full version ...

https://youtu.be/n00JzNM3vGA?si=BKAnHDMAp6khYjgS

Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist

Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,”
 

These days’ [sic] radio stations seem to play each band’s most popular song vastly more often than even it’s [sic] second most popular song.
 

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @anonymous, @Captain Tripps

That skinny no muscles look described me (still does) and I was a big punk fan as a teen in the early 80s. Then I went to my first punk concert (Social Distortion in 1982) and the crowd wasn't my fellow skinny no muscle nerds. It was a very edgy, hardcore group of people I couldn't relate to. I knew I wasn't a punk rocker after all. Today most of it sounds terrible to me although I have a few punk songs saved to my playlists for nostalgia sake.

Replies: @Ministry Of Tongues, @Captain Tripps

Thanks for this trip down memory lane . . . BTW, do you know why they're called 'Stryper'? It's an allusion to Isaiah 53:5, i.e. 'with his stripes we are healed'.

After 35 years, I am still not quite sure if this is edifying or blasphemous, or maybe both.

Replies: @Known Fact

I live in France and am amazed at how many places play American oldies. Motown is especially common.

 

Replies: @nebulafox, @Jim Don Bob

Yeah, no category for "The '60s," which made it impossible for anyone to vote for the greatest decade in Rock music.

Well, this long set is for all you guys and gals who missed the '60s, especially the early '60s during the JFK years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSWMJxbxj7c

Runaway
Del Shannon
1961

Nine more below the tag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6oLjo4R2aQ

Runaround Sue
Dion & the Belmonts
1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw67OOjZ3oE

Johnny Angel
Shelley Fabres
1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSkum4B162M

And Then He Kissed Me
Crystals
1963

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXo1zAwIwnw

Rag Doll
Frankie Valli & Four seasons
1964

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aFTLu4stOw

Along Comes Mary
The Association
1966

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NJayW1kOeM

California Dreaming
Mamas & Papas
1966

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-SO8JcsvWU

Up, Up and Away
The 5th Dimension
1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18Sua_QTDs0

Stormy
Classics IV
1968

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xGxQXmu7Os

Get Together
Youngbloods
1969

Replies: @J.Ross, @Gary in Gramercy, @FPD72

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Gary in Gramercy

Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Gary in Gramercy

Replies: @Known Fact

Yeah, no category for "The '60s," which made it impossible for anyone to vote for the greatest decade in Rock music.

Well, this long set is for all you guys and gals who missed the '60s, especially the early '60s during the JFK years.