Speaker 1: I want you to close your eyes and daydream with
Speaker 1: me for a second. It's nineteen fifty five. You are
Speaker 1: a clerk at a dusty record shop in downtown Detroit.
Speaker 1: The phone rings. It's a guy from Billboard magazine. He's
Speaker 1: got a clipboard and a pencil, and he's asking you
Speaker 1: exactly how many forty five RPM copies of Bill Haley's
Speaker 1: Rock around the Clock you sold this week. You look
Speaker 1: at your handwritten ledger, give him a number, and that
Speaker 1: becomes history. Now snap back to twenty twenty six. No
Speaker 1: phone calls, no clipboards, just millions of lines of code
Speaker 1: tracking every time someone hungs a song into their phone
Speaker 1: or loops a fifteen second TikTok clip. Today on Crash
Speaker 1: Course Pod, we're looking at the Bible of music. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the history, the evolution, and the controversy of
Speaker 1: the Billboard charts. How do we get from counting vinyls
Speaker 1: to counting YouTube views? Well, sit back, get a snack,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk awe about it. So before
Speaker 1: we get into the forties, we have to talk about
Speaker 1: why it's even called Billboard. It was founded in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety four in Cincinnati by two guys named William Donaldson
Speaker 1: and James Hannigan. Remember those names, Donaldson and Hannigan. And
Speaker 1: get this. When Billboard was founded, it had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with music. It was a trade journal for bill posters,
Speaker 1: the guys who literally pasted advertisements on walls. They covered
Speaker 1: outdoor advertising, which means they tracked circuses, carnivals, and traveling
Speaker 1: vaudeville shows. If you were a lion tamer or a
Speaker 1: clown in the nineteen hundreds, then Billboard was your trade paper,
Speaker 1: so to say. It wasn't until the nineteen thirties that
Speaker 1: they realized recorded music was the next big thing. They
Speaker 1: launched their first music popularity chart in July nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets This is where it
Speaker 1: get interesting for the history music head buffs. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, vinyls weren't even a thing yet. They were
Speaker 1: actually seventy eight rpm shellac records. They were heavy, brutal,
Speaker 1: and they shatter like glass if you dropped them. Vinyl,
Speaker 1: the LPs and forty fives we Love Today didn't hit
Speaker 1: the market until late forties. Actually, the first number one
Speaker 1: in July nineteen forty was Tommy Dorsey's I'll Never Smile again,
Speaker 1: featuring a young Frank Sinatra, that topped the best selling
Speaker 1: retail records charts. But back then one chart wasn't good enough.
Speaker 1: In the forties, Billboard had a holy trinity of charts
Speaker 1: which included sales, juke block juke box plays, and radio airplay.
Speaker 1: To be a true legend, you had to top all three.
Speaker 1: It was the original triple crown. Think about that. Though
Speaker 1: the charts weren't about what you owned, they were about
Speaker 1: what you were willing to put a nickel into at
Speaker 1: a diner. It was the original streaming. Eventually they added
Speaker 1: sheet music sales because, believe it or not, people used
Speaker 1: to buy them notes to play songs at home more
Speaker 1: than they bought the actual records. Then, by nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: eight they consolidated everything into the hot one hundred we
Speaker 1: know today. They combined sales and radio airplay for fifty years.
Speaker 1: That was a gold standard. If you were on Billboard
Speaker 1: number one, in that number one spot, you were the
Speaker 1: biggest artist on the planet period. Now the pivot. Remember
Speaker 1: the last episode in Room for Improvement where I mentioned
Speaker 1: the two thousand and five two thousand and six window.
Speaker 1: Actually that was the most chaotic time for Billboard. This
Speaker 1: was the era of fifty cent owning the top five.
Speaker 1: In spring of two thousand and five, he had Candy
Speaker 1: Shop at number one, how We Do at number four,
Speaker 1: and Disco in Fir at number five. He was the
Speaker 1: first solo artist to do it. The only ones to
Speaker 1: do it before him was the Beatles. But going back
Speaker 1: to Billboard and number one, the system was breaking because
Speaker 1: people had stopped buying CDs and started downloading songs on iTunes.
Speaker 1: This created a crisis for Billboard. Let me ask you,
Speaker 1: does a ninety nine sit download count as much as
Speaker 1: a fifteen dollars album? Think about it? These are the
Speaker 1: questions that Billboard had to sort out. Then came twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: the Harlem Shake year. Billboard started counting YouTube views, so
Speaker 1: suddenly a viral meme could push a song to number one,
Speaker 1: even if nobody was buying it. This changed the DNA
Speaker 1: of music. Artists stopped making four minute stories and started
Speaker 1: making fifteen second quote unquote moments designed to trend breaking news,
Speaker 1: breaking new speaking of YouTube video or YouTube views. As
Speaker 1: of January sixteenth, twenty twenty six, I believe that's the
Speaker 1: date YouTube actually stopped providing data to Billboard. YouTube and
Speaker 1: Billboard had a massive falling out because YouTube wanted free
Speaker 1: streams to count as much as paid ones, and Billboard refused.
Speaker 1: So right now in twenty twenty six, YouTube fuse do
Speaker 1: not count towards Hot one hundred or Billboard two hundred.
Speaker 1: And that's as of now February nineteenth, twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: Will it change, I'm sure, but that's the information that
Speaker 1: has out as of now. Now Here's where or Here's
Speaker 1: where gets me as a music at the weight in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty six, not all listens are created equal. Since
Speaker 1: we're currently in February twenty twenty six, Billboard literally just
Speaker 1: changed the rules a month ago, so on July seventeenth,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty six, they updated the math. So the new
Speaker 1: rule is it now takes one thousand page streams to
Speaker 1: equal one album seal and if you're on a free account,
Speaker 1: it takes two thousand, five hundred streams. Compare that to
Speaker 1: one person buying a physical vinyl record. One vinyl equals
Speaker 1: one sale. And the biggest debate in the industry right
Speaker 1: now is why does one person buying a physical vinyl
Speaker 1: record count more than twelve hundred fifty or one thousand streams,
Speaker 1: so it used to like the old way it went
Speaker 1: was twelve, one, two and fifty streams that were paid
Speaker 1: equals and albums. So now it's reduced down to one thousand.
Speaker 1: So that's where I got twelve to fifty from. So
Speaker 1: let's let's ask that question again, shall we? Why does
Speaker 1: one person buying a physical vinyl record count more than
Speaker 1: one thousand streams? It's a math problem, and Billboard is
Speaker 1: trying to balance value versus volume. If someone spends thirty
Speaker 1: dollars on a vinyl then they've essentially voted for that
Speaker 1: artist with their wallet. If I just let a playlist
Speaker 1: run while I'm asleep, am I really a fan? Or
Speaker 1: am I data? Now? This brings us to the ultimate
Speaker 1: question for Crash course Pot today. Is the chart a
Speaker 1: measure of quality or popularity? Back in the day, the
Speaker 1: charts were a barrier to entry. You had to be
Speaker 1: good to get on the radio. Now, not so much.
Speaker 1: The charts are a reflection of our attention spans. You
Speaker 1: can game the system with bundles, twenty four hour loops
Speaker 1: and TikTok challenges. Even bodying has become a thing, and
Speaker 1: also playlists you know buying yourself onto the Spotify playlist.
Speaker 1: Is the number one song actually the best song? Or
Speaker 1: is it just the one the algorithm pushed the hardest. Personally,
Speaker 1: I think we've lost a bit of the soul in
Speaker 1: the pursuits of the stats. But as long as Billboard exists,
Speaker 1: it's the only scoreboard We've got to be honest, this
Speaker 1: is they're the ones keeping track of all of this.
Speaker 1: Let's take a look at some Billboard heavy hitters, basically
Speaker 1: some record breaking Billboard stats as of or for twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. Let's just keep it simple. So the record
Speaker 1: category of most number one hits that goes to the
Speaker 1: Beatles with twenty songs. Then we have most weeks at
Speaker 1: number one. We have Mariah Carey All I Want for
Speaker 1: Christmas is You with twenty two weeks. Then we have
Speaker 1: most weeks at number one artists and that's Mariah Carey
Speaker 1: with one hundred and one week's total. And then we
Speaker 1: have most Billboard two hundred number one albums, and that
Speaker 1: goes to the Beatles with nineteen albums. And then we
Speaker 1: have longest charting album that goes to Pink Floyd The
Speaker 1: Dark Side of the Moon nine hundred and ninety plus
Speaker 1: week nine hundred and ninety plus weeks. So the landscape
Speaker 1: has changed a lot, with streaming allowing some massive new
Speaker 1: records to be set. Recently, we have the Taylor Swift takeover.
Speaker 1: Taylor has been literally the first artist to ever occupy
Speaker 1: the entire top ten of the Hot one hundred simultaneously,
Speaker 1: and she's actually done it multiple times with her latest albums.
Speaker 1: As of twenty twenty six, she holds the record for
Speaker 1: the most cumulative weeks at number one for a solo
Speaker 1: artist on the bill Board two hundred, surpassing ninety eight weeks.
Speaker 1: Of course, we already talked about the Christmas Queen Mariah Carey.
Speaker 1: Her All I Want for Christmas Is You is a
Speaker 1: statistical anomaly. It hits number one almost every single year,
Speaker 1: and in January twenty twenty six, it extended its record
Speaker 1: as the longest running number one song ever at twenty
Speaker 1: two weeks. Shout out to Mariah Carey. Now with global dominance,
Speaker 1: newer names like Bad Bunny and burn a Boy are
Speaker 1: shattering first ever records. Burna Boy recently became the first
Speaker 1: African artist to have a song on the Hot one
Speaker 1: hundred for six consecutive years. That's from twenty twenty one
Speaker 1: to two, thy twenty six, five or six consecutive years.
Speaker 1: But I think it's six consecutive years, counting twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: then twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six, and before Mariah
Speaker 1: Carey's holiday hit pulled Ahead Lil Nas ex Oldtown Road
Speaker 1: and Shabouzi a bar song. Tipsy retired for the longest
Speaker 1: running modern number one at nineteen weeks. So Billboard changes
Speaker 1: how they count things over the years. As we discussed,
Speaker 1: back in the day, you had to physically buy a
Speaker 1: CD or wait for the radio to play a song.
Speaker 1: But now our streaming habits are tracked in real time
Speaker 1: and megastars like Taylor Swift can flood the charts the
Speaker 1: second in album drops. Fun fact, the Beatles achieved their
Speaker 1: twenty number one hits in just six years from nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four to nineteen seventy. Most artists today take decades
Speaker 1: to even get close to that, So shout out to
Speaker 1: the Beatles. So next time you see your favorite artists
Speaker 1: celebrating a number one debut, remember the Clerk in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five with the pencil, the tools. The tools I've changed,
Speaker 1: but the hunger for the number one spot is still
Speaker 1: the same. Catch us next week and we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about another person who built an Atlanta empire, and I'll
Speaker 1: let that be a secret. In the meantime, check the
Speaker 1: links below for more entertainment. Bye.