Billboard--Taylor Swift IS the Top 10

[RobGNYC]

Artistic merit aside, does anyone else think that the Billboard charts have become meaningless?

www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/taylor-swift-all-hot-100-top-10-anti-hero-1235163664/

[erik]

Just to put this into context, back in April 1964, four characters from Liverpool held down all Top 5 positions on the Billboard Hot 100 at once (do I really need to name them? [he asked rhetorically])

This, however, is chart domination put on a heavy dose of steroids on the part of T-Swift, not to mention egotism on those same steroids. How one feels about the validity of the Billboard charts is one thing. This is something else entirely.

[RobGNYC]

The Beatles held the entire Top 5 with singles on four different labels (Capitol, Vee Jay, Tollie, Swan).  It was about the music rather than a marketing blitz ("Collect all four vinyl versions!"). Swift is undoubtedly a master marketer--business schools will teach courses on her career if they aren't doing it already. But it makes the music seem almost beside the point and the Billboard chart this week reflects that. 

[erik]

Quote by RobGNYC:

Swift is undoubtedly a master marketer--business schools will teach courses on her career if they aren't doing it already. But it makes the music seem almost beside the point and the Billboard chart this week reflects that.

I won't dispute any of that; if anything, they probably are already teaching it in courses on Music Business. Marketing and image are everything these days; and probably nobody since Madonna has been better at it than T-Swift. Would that her music would be of the quality to justify it because I don't think it does. Of course, that clearly doesn't matter to any of this era's music-buying public.

[Prisoner In Disguise]

I've got my own complaints with the Billboard charts, but I feel that this is earned, being that over 15 million individual people streamed the album within the first few days of release if I'm remembering correctly. If we considered each individual person (not individual stream, since many people replayed it) a sale (which Billboard doesn't) then that'd be massive. Over 500 million streams in a single week is so huge that I'm unable to comprehend that. The population of the USA and Russia combined could stream it and we'd still be short of what it actually reached. That, and having this many sales in physical copies in 2022 is incredible. A lot of it is down to people buying different versions of the vinyl records, but there's still 400,000 sales in CDs, 160,000 in digital downloads, and 10,000 in cassettes. Still, I feel that the fact that it's possible to take the entire top 10 shows that there are problems in the Billboard charts that need to be resolved.