With the debut of Drake and J. Cole’s song “First Person Shooter” at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, Drake officially tied Michael Jackson for the most number-one singles by a solo male artist in history. Jackson has held the record since his single “You Are Not Alone,” topped the charts in 1995. Now, almost thirty years later, the title is contested.
This has led to an uptick in discussions about whether or not the pre and post-streaming eras can be compared. Can the success of artists that thrive in the streaming era, like Drake, be compared to that of pre-streaming artists, like Michael Jackson?
To understand the debate, it is important to understand how the Billboard Hot 100 is calculated. Billboard has been at the forefront of music tracking and charting for over a century, with their first chart titled “Last Week’s Ten Best Sellers Among the Popular Songs,” initially debuting in 1913. As music consumption became more accessible during the golden age of radio broadcasting (1920s-1950s) and later with the invention of the RCA tape cartridge, the precursor of the cassette tape, in the late 1950s, the commercialization of music exploded. Music became available to people across socioeconomic classes, and musical artists could gain recognition on a previously unimaginable magnitude. Record labels entered the scene, and music began to be distributed on a massive scale.
Billboard, evolving with the growing popularity and rapid commercialization of music, published its first Top 100 chart in November 1955. The Hot 100 premiered only three years later in August of 1958, as Billboard’s main all-genres popularity chart. Ricky Nelson had the first Hot 100 number one with his single, ‘Poor Little Fool.’ Since then, The Hot 100 has been the industry standard for measuring the popularity of songs.
However, the nature of music consumption hasn’t stopped changing in the 65 years since the conception of The Hot 100, notably with the rise of streaming in the early 2000s. Before the age of streaming, The Hot 100 was calculated based on sales and radio airplay. However, the formula to calculate the chart has changed several times throughout its history to tailor to the rise and fall of different popularity measures.
For example, when single sales were high, Billboard would place more importance on the commercial income of a song than its radio time. In the 90s, many labels stopped releasing singles for individual sale altogether, favoring album promotion. As a response, Billboard controversially allowed album cuts – songs that were exclusively available on an album and not released as a single – to be eligible to chart on The Hot 100.
With the introduction of digital downloads, sales shifted away from physical purchases. Billboard began to incorporate digital sales into their calculation of The Hot 100 in 2005. However, at this point, the chart was still calculated primarily on sales, albeit now physical and digital. It wasn’t until the rise of streaming that the chart began to account for the number of times a song was listened to instead of how many times it was sold.
Before streaming, one sale counted as one sale, regardless of how many times the buyer actually listened to the song. In the streaming era, the number of times a song was listened to rather than the number of times it was bought, was heavily influential to how songs charted. Billboard implemented this change in 2013 by allowing data from streaming services like Spotify and even YouTube to impact The Hot 100 equation.
Today, The Billboard Hot 100 is calculated using a combination of sales (digital and physical), airplay, and streams. To reconcile the worlds of sales and streaming, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has come up with ratio standards, referred to as TEA, SEA, and SPS. TEA (track equivalent albums) equates ten song downloads from the same album to one album sale. SEA (streaming equivalent album) equates 1250 premium streams or 3750 free streams to one album sale. SPS (sales plus streaming) is the final product, combining TEA and SEA to create a holistic representation of a song or album’s success, expressed through the measurement of ‘units’.
The music industry has been able to modify its ways of recognizing a song’s success in the ever-changing musical landscape for decades, even during complete upheavals of the way we listen. Through the use of ratios and industry standards, the pre-streaming world is not implacable in the age of modern listening.
So, to the displeasure of music traditionalists and Drake haters (myself included), Drake’s success can’t be undermined by the insinuation that pre and post-music eras can’t be compared.
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