Melissa Lujan's List: OOA Week 2 Post

• Up until recently, the charts were fairly predictable and stagnant, with only artists with the greatest amount of money and promotional muscle behind them rising to the top. Radio airplay, a chief component of Billboard's formula, is very difficult to crack without a huge amount of promo money, and even if you gain some leverage there, songs can get sunk based on the findings of radio research firms who help stations develop strategies to keep listeners from turning the dial.
• 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.
• The two most recent No. 1 singles on the Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Thrift Shop" and Baauer's "Harlem Shake," are the first songs released by independent labels to hit the top of the chart in two decades. "Thrift Shop" made it to No. 1 without the new rules taking effect, but probably would have hit the top much sooner if they were already in place, since it's a been a major viral hit on YouTube for months. These are extreme examples, but 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.

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• Are we entering a new Video-Killed-the-Radio-Star era, a period in which, more than ever, we’ll watch our hit songs? Does this represent a shifting of center of pop’s center of gravity: away from megastars to weird up-and-comers, one-offs, novelty acts, Rick-Rollers? (Isn’t this what we’ve been seeing for the last year, anyway, with the rise of Gotye and Fun and Carly Rae Jepsen and Macklemore and Psy, and now, of course, Baauer?) Have we entered a new golden age of vernacular dancing, where the music follows the moves, where hits begin with Stanky Leggs and horse-gallops?