Jordan Brown's List: YouTube Activity Adds to Billboard's Hot 100

• You'd think because "The Internet" equals "music piracy," your favorite pop stars would never make any money from those millions and millions of clicks on their YouTube videos. But YouTube is fast becoming a place -- certainly more so than MTV (which rarely paid artists a cent ) -- where fans can boost the budgets of singers and songwriters.

• VIDEO: Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines"

   

  METHOD: Monetization

   

  MONEY MADE ESTIMATE: $350,000

• VIDEO: Baauer's "Harlem Shake"

   

  METHOD: Content ID

   

  MONEY MADE ESTIMATE: $400,000
• if somebody owns the copyright to a song within a video, and demands that the service take it down, it comes down. But first, YouTube offers a different approach: "Content ID." That means if your wacky wedding video is set to Chris Brown's "Forever," Brown and his record label can agree to cover the thing with ads and take a cut of the royalties.
• Vevo, a partnership between YouTube and major record labels that is designed to share the wealth between the online-video and music industries, has paid $200 million to video owners since the service's 2009 debut.
• YouTube music pages often contain links to iTunes, Amazon MP3 or Google Play, where fans can easily click to buy the track as a digital download. "Just Give Me a Reason" sold more than 3.5 million copies at $1.29 apiece and, while the online retailers take a cut, most of this money is profit for Pink and her record label.
• Money estimates based on information from music-business sources, Kickstarter, Nielsen SoundScan, and news reports.

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• 1. It Balances Out The Corporate Influence On Radio

  • Billboard has been steadily adjusting their charts over the past two years to reflect major shifts in music consumption – digital sales, on-demand play from services like Spotify – and the result has destabilized chart data in both obvious and subtle ways, with left field artists like Gotye and Macklemore hitting No. 1 and album tracks by Mumford & Sons and Kendrick Lamar crowding out the Hot 100 and genre charts.
• 2. It Introduces An Element Of Chaos

  • An artist doesn’t need to be signed to a label or officially release music to be eligible for the chart, though it will be hard to get to the upper reaches without sales, on-demand play, or airplay adding to the overall tally. Artists don’t even need to try for a hit – Baauer and Psy’s songs broke through to the mainstream entirely on the enthusiasm of fans and would not have been pushed to pop radio under normal circumstances.
• 3. Independent Labels Have A Fighting Chance

  • plenty of indie acts with strong followings and popular videos now have a solid chance at cracking the Hot 100. It’s not a level playing field now, but artists now have the opportunity to break big without having to work with a major label. Think of it as the pop chart equivalent of asymmetrical warfare.
• 4. Established Stars Get A Boost Too

  • They also serve to enhance the chart placement of established artists with large major label budgets.
    
    
    
    
• Big Labels Will Try To Game The System

  • It seems like a given that corporate labels and marketers will attempt to game the system and manufacture “viral” hits.
• 6. The New System May Be Biased Against Poor And Minority Audiences

  • the shift in favor of pop, alternative music, and viral hits suggests that the new emphasis on digital media privileges the tastes of relatively affluent white listeners who are more likely to buy mp3s from the iTunes store or spend a lot of time online.
• 7. Viral Songs May Warp The Intention Of The Chart

  • Part of the appeal of having a Hot 100 in the first place is that it’s a useful way of gauging the actual popularity of music from week to week. YouTube data threatens to warp this by favoring a lot of songs that are arguably just the soundtrack to a visual meme, like “Harlem Shake,” or spread because the public at large actually hated the song and wanted to make fun of it, like with Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”
    
    
    
    YouTube revenue has become a crucial aspect of the music business. They need to include this data in order to present an accurate picture of the most successful songs of the moment.

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• In a Twitter rant Tuesday night, Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard, accused her of allegedly trying to better her views on YouTube's music-video viewing site VEVO for her new single, “Applause.” The rant began after Gaga (real name: Stefani Germanotta) sent out a to-do list message to her 39.7 million followers on Twitter, asking fans to watch and share her latest music video.

   

  “An artist tweeting out and Facebooking a link that enables a fan to hit play and leave their computer is not the spirit of why we chart,” tweeted Werde. “I just hate it when anyone tries to game the charts, be it fans or artists. It’s not in the spirit of what we do, celebrating success,” he added.

• The new Billboard puts song purchases and mere listens on equal footing, and it stirred up considerable ire from the music industry.
• Before now, the Billboard chart wasn’t equipped to track viral sensations; the equation that once predicted, explained, and produced hits no longer worked.