How the Net has Changed Charting the Real Song of Summer

Is it the DJs in the clubs, numbers of downloads, airplay on the radio, that tune everyone you know is listening to? Or is it something else?

What makes that memorable summer song that blasts out of car stereos, beach-based boom boxes or that joggers are playing so loudly on their earphones that you can hear it as they bounce past?

Like so much else, determining hits has evolved not so much as our musical tastes have changed but as we record and measure the ways in which we buy access to the tunefulness that suffuses our lives.

It would be nice to think that we are collectively moving to an enchanting beat. But the reality is that the manner by which we record, report and measure how we listen actually has a profound influence on what's hot and what's not.

The outcome, perhaps not surprisingly, reinforces the power of those already in a position of influence. The established artists benefit from the fact that people browse their latest outputs because they are already well known. The curious result is that instead of fostering an explosion of opportunities for new artists attuned to the diverse tastes of the human menagerie, the net has further concentrated attention on a smaller selection of predictable choices.

That the net has grown in concert with the winner-take-all, too-big-to fail institutions both human and corporate is consistent with the growing ability of those who can manipulate it effectively. The measurement experience reflects that power of concentration. Whether this turns out to be a bug or a feature remains to be seen. JL

Maura Johnston reports in the New York Times:

Because of changes to chart methodologies, Billboard’s Hot 100 paints a different picture of pop culture. In 2012 streaming music data came; YouTube streams were added in 2013.This has turned out to compound the status of the artists who are already the most prominent,

IN the American mind, summer is a time of long drives to off-the-beaten-path places, stretches of doing nothing at the pool or the beach, or even just skipping out of work a couple of hours early. It also allows for more listening — car windows that would be rolled up to protect against frigid weather are cracked, the music playing on dashboard radios or from phones connected to speakers turned up just loud enough to float into the street.

For me, Jane’s Addiction’s “Stop!,” a brash, screeching protest against the status quo, will always bring to mind the hot, rhetorically heated summer of 1990. Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” conjures the summer of 1996, specifically the long drive from Chicago to Washington, D.C., on which I first heard it. (And heard it again. And again.) And the strident drumbeats that open Rihanna’s “Umbrella” will always bring me back to hearing it while taking shelter from a squall in a bodega across the street from the Queens apartment where I lived in the summer of 2007, when the storming ode to friendship was in constant rotation on the radio.

As Top 40 monoculture has dissipated and fractured into various niches in the wake of streaming outlets like Spotify and YouTube that offer huge swaths of popular music, the notion of “the song of the summer” has stubbornly persisted. But it’s a popularity contest that is defined by the charts, and not whether the songs have anything to do with the beach, boardwalks, surfing, convertibles, bikinis or, in fact, with any notion of summer at all.

In the past two years, the incorporation of streaming data into the Billboard Hot 100 chart calculus has made dominant summer songs even more so. You might think that data on streaming would reveal more idiosyncrasies and individual tastes in what we listen to, but it turns out that we’re all mostly listening to the same things, even when we have more to choose from.

This year “Fancy,” on which Iggy Azalea’s boastful self-affirmations play Ping-Pong with Charli XCX’s hook celebrating minibar decadence, reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in early June and didn’t relinquish the crown for almost two months.

“Fancy” is one of those crossover songs — approved for airplay on both Top 40 stations and their more hip-hop-leaning cousins — that can become almost maddeningly omnipresent. I’ve heard it while browsing air-conditioned mall stores and walking past idling cars on hot Boston afternoons. Weird Al Yankovic parodied it on his new top-selling album, “Mandatory Fun,” as “Handy,” an ad for a fix-it man; it has been lampooned as a harmony-rich Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singalong and as an anthem for expectant mothers. The extra attention doesn’t contribute to more chart points for the original, but it does crystallize the song itself in more listeners’ memories.

Because of changes to chart methodologies, Billboard’s Hot 100 — the ranking of the most popular songs in the United States — paints a different picture of pop culture than it once did. Sales from brick-and-mortar retailers and spins on radio remain a factor, but in 2012 streaming music data came into the picture; YouTube streams were added in 2013.

This shift has turned out to consolidate and compound the status of the artists who are already the most prominent, in part because the way streaming services are designed can reinforce market share: Even just browsing the “most popular” lists on Spotify or Rdio serves to strengthen the chart position of those songs. This means that tracks that might have crossed over into the Top 40 from other formats in the past — straight country songs, or R&B that appeals to the grown-folks demographic — are more likely to stagnate in the chart’s bottom third.

In 2010 Billboard introduced its Songs of the Summer chart, a cumulative countdown that tracks radio spins and sales between Memorial Day and Labor Day. (Streaming data was added later.) “Fancy” still leads this chart’s in-progress 2014 edition, although it has been bumped aside on the separate Hot 100 chart by the lite-reggae song “Rude” by the Canadian band Magic! and bowled over online by Beyoncé’s remix of “Flawless” with Nicki Minaj, released on the web in early August.

When Billboard created its summer chart, it also retroactively charted the top songs of summers from 1985 onward. Some of the winners were unsurprising — Mariah Carey’s torchy 2005 comeback single, “We Belong Together,” and UB40’s reggae-tinged 1993 reworking of Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” somehow seemed suited to the season. Others, though, caused a bit of head-scratching. What made Tears for Fears’s “Shout” the top song of the summer of 1985, besides sheer bean-counting? It certainly wasn’t the video, in which the gloomy duo stood about sullenly in overcoats.

Do these charts, made in retrospect and with numbers trumping emotion, lack a particular spark? Do they fail to capture what it is that catches our ears during these warm, hazy days? While the horse-race chatter about which song has ruled the season is fun — even when it’s couched as a complaint about a track’s ubiquity — the true test of a song of the summer comes after the fact.

Think of the summer of 2009, which Billboard decreed as belonging to “I Gotta Feeling” and “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas. The numbers, however, hid the truth of that summer, which belonged to someone who had last held it decades before — Michael Jackson, whose death that June led radio stations across the country to ditch their playlists and give over their airwaves to his music.

Jackson’s songs and albums didn’t appear on Billboard’s main charts at all that summer, because of rules then in effect that shunted catalog material out of contention. But the shared experience was a flashback to summers when songs like “Beat It” and “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” floated through the air. It also represented a mourning that was channeled into a celebration of how these songs had shaped popular culture and how deeply they were embedded in our memory.

Perhaps that’s why certain summer songs make themselves known as such only years later, presenting themselves as personal songs of the season when we are looking through photographs and postcards, and not lists or charts. These songs that become a personal or collective soundtrack allow for summer’s wide-open potential to unfold into the air all around us; only after time has passed do they fall into patterns on a crinkled-up map of where we once were.