In tune with our times

Pop charts give downloads a voice

By JIM FARBER


Ciara tops Billboard's new Pop 100 list.


Download rankings have helped Lenny Kravitz but hurt Lloyd Banks.




Pop used to be so simple.
You had a No. 1 single and everyone in the country hummed your tune.

But over the years, trends began tearing away at the old notion of a hit.

People started buying fewer and fewer singles — to the point where someone could go No. 1 in sales with as little as 5,000 copies purchased.

Radio stations kept splitting into ever-narrower formats, based on genre, taste and demographics.

All of which made it increasingly hard to form a consensus on what was truly the biggest song in the land.

Then came downloads, adding even more confusion.

The legal version of this practice has been growing by leaps and bounds of late — listeners draw up to 6 million tunes into their computers or portable players every week. While the music industry's bible, Billboard, introduced a Digital chart in July 2003, the magazine still had no way to reflect those sales on its far more influential pop song chart.

Until now.

This week, Billboard began figuring in download sales in its main pop singles list, mixed with the two other factors it long leaned on — radio play and retail sales.

At the same time, the magazine has introduced a new, download-enhanced chart that more accurately measures those songs that truly are the most popular.

Dubbed the Pop 100 list, the new chart — with Ciara's "1, 2 Step" at the top — takes the radio portion of its data solely from Mainstream Top 40 stations. (The old Hot 100 list draws from a far wider variety of formats).

Adding downloads has already had a striking effect.

The Killers' "Mr. Brightside" didn't even make the previous Hot 100 Song list. This week, it's in the Top 40. Last week, Lenny Kravitz's "Lady" was at No. 40. The download factor boosted it to the mid-20s. Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" shot from No. 8 to 4.

On the other end, the rapper Lloyd Banks has felt the sting of stingy downloads. His "Karma" plunged from the teens to the 30s. "The new system brings the consumer's voice back onto the charts," explains Silvio Pietroluongo, who manages the new chart for Billboard. "Radio play is really important, but nothing replaces the consumer who actively buys a single."

Over the years, that voice has been quieting to a whisper. While single sales were huge in the '60s and '70s, by the mid-'90s they had faded — a trend greatly encouraged by the labels themselves.

"The companies felt they were cannibalizing album sales," explains Billboard's Geoff Mayfield.

Increasingly, radio singles weren't even released to stores. When a song like No Doubt's "Don't Speak" was one of the nation's biggest songs in the '90s, it wasn't anywhere on Billboard's chart because the magazine would list only singles fans could buy in stores.

By December 1998, the magazine ended the ban on nonretail songs. But it still allowed sales of singles to account for fully 25% of its Hot 100 Song chart. Only in the last 18 months has that ratio plunged to roughly 1%, where it remains.

That left room for downloads, which have been escalating at a breathtaking clip. Right after Christmas, Billboard's chart mavens noticed a spike, from an average of 4 million or 5 million to more than 6 million for the week.

"Everyone was getting iPods and [download services] gift cards for presents," Pietroluongo explains.

Adding downloads has the potential to broaden the types of songs that enter the single chart, because listeners can choose any song from an album — old or new.

While radio's influence on the chart is reduced, Mayfield says, download information could help programmers choose a more popular mix. "It shows them directly what people really want," he says.

The new, two-fisted singles lists give everyone more, and different, information about what's popular. With its broad list of stations, the Hot 100 shows us which songs are getting the widest airing. With its sharper mainstream focus, the Pop list tells us which songs have the most popular appeal.

This can result in some notable differences in a song's position on the two charts. Currently, T.I.'s "Bring 'Em Out" is Top 12 on the Hot 100, but it's only No. 51 on the Pop list, because its play is far stronger on niche hip-hop and R&B stations.

Teen pop's Jesse McCartney's "Beautiful Soul" stands at 6 on Pop but 16 on the Hot 100, because he gets more play on mass-market Top 40 stations.

Observers expect the downloading factor on both charts to grow significantly. Pietroluongo wouldn't be surprised if it one day reached a 50% parity with radio. (Right now, downloads account for 33% of the overall chart.)

Regardless of how you measure popularity, adding downloads, and creating the Pop list, helps the charts get closer to their ultimate goal — accuracy.


How to catch up with downloading


So you're finally ready to take a dip in the ocean-size pool of digital music available on the Web. If the last time you bought a record it was black, 12 inches wide and had a hole in the middle, you may need a little practice. But with patience, you'll soon be pumping up the iJam.

And if you've ever opened an E-mail attachment or ordered something from Amazon, you're already halfway there. Here's a few pointers to get you started.

1. The system

If your computer (PC or Mac) is less than four years old, it's certain you have software for playing digital music files and a sound card. If not, you can download free programs such as iTunes, Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. If your machine is too old to be rehabilitated, you can buy a high quality PC or Mac for as little as $500.

You're also going to want to have at least a few gigabytes of computer space free on your hard drive. You'll be able to store about 250 songs per gigabyte.

Finally, you need an Internet connection. It's possible to download music with a 56K dial-up connection, but it won't be pleasurable. Look into speeding up service with a DSL or cable modem.

2. The stores

There are a half-dozen "major" music sellers on the Web. Most of them charge 99 cents per song via your credit card, and they'll all let you hear a song sample before you buy. Each has its own quirks, usually due to the kind of copy protection encoded into each track.

The most popular is iTunes (itunes.com). You can play the music on any home computer, but ­because iTunes sells music in the AAC format, the only portable players you can use are Apple's iPod and iShuffle.

Microsoft Networks Music (music.msn.com) also has a huge catalogue. Songs come in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which can be played on all computers, but not in iTunessoftware or the Apple iPod.

Though it used to be the king of illegal downloads, Napster wants to be the prince of subscription services. You can buy tracks for 99 cents each, but the heart of Napster is a $9.95 monthly membership fee that lets you listen to anything in their ­million-song catalogue. Two caveats: It doesn't work with ­Apple, and the minute your ­subscription ­expires, so does your access to all the songs you've downloaded.

Other popular sites include MusicMatch (musicmatch.com), MP3 (mp3.com), Real Networks (music.guide.real.com) and Virgin Digital (virgindigital.com).


Isaac Guzman
[Edited 2/8/05 1:45am]

sure the system arrives to help Lenny Kravitz vault into the top 30..why couldnt they have done this when the Musicology single was selling well on Itunes? eeesh )

Mazerati said:

Vertigo by U2 might have been a top-10 hit; it's a platnium download and had a huge run at the top of the I-Tunes chart.