In other words, female R&B artists have had a rough two years. To distinguish the Rihannas from the Ambrosiuses, Billboard publishes an “adult R&B” chart as a programming equivalent to a halfway house. 1 on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart in 2012), for artists like Ambrosius and Ledisi, it’s small consolation. While Pharrell’s “Happy” and John Legend’s “All of Me” suggest a black resurgence on the Hot 100, and it’s heartening to watch Miguel cross over (“ Adorn” lingered a record 20 weeks at No.
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Her R&B and pop success were now indivisible. A mere week after the changes, as Molanphy noted, “ Diamonds” zoomed from the 60s to No. It may surprise readers that Rihanna’s R&B chart presence before 2012 had been miniscule. The effects of this change have been crafty and far-reaching. Playlists at black stations have tightened as programmers switch to playing Lorde and Rihanna. “Elsewhere it’s created a drive to find the songs that get the biggest and broadest audience response, which often are pop songs that can work as cross-format smashes,” noted an article published in Billboard itself last spring. To achieve sales and radio parity, Molanphy writes, “ Billboard also incorporated airplay across all radio formats into the genre charts so airplay from Top 40 or adult-contemporary stations of, say, an R&B song would now count for the R&B chart, of a country song would count for the country chart, and so forth.” The inclusion of digital and streaming data skews all charts toward pop hits-a cataclysmic impact on the R&B chart. Now the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart looks a lot like the Hot 100. Slate contributor Chris Molanphy’s meticulous and depressing account in Pitchfork of how the Hot R&B chart has evolved-and devolved-explains the impact. Blige, TLC, and so on-happened in part because Billboard reflected with accuracy what the majority of white and black consumers bought.īillboard decided in 2012 to count digital and streaming sales of singles so that they registered on every chart. What many listeners remember as a golden age of hip-hop and R&B-Tupac, Nas, Mary J. This led to instant results on the Billboard album chart. When Billboard applied this tracking system, known as Nielsen SoundScan, to what was then called the Hot R&B Singles chart in 1993, it confirmed what American kids had known for years: Hip-hop was our rock ’n’ roll. The result: Purchased albums were often undercounted. Until bar-code scanning of albums and singles became the norm on the album and Hot 100 singles charts in 1991, industry analysts relied on gentlemen’s agreement confirmations from retailers who often, to be polite, misrepresented sales.
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To understand what this means to female R&B in 2014, consider Billboard’s contorted history of assessing black consumer data. In 2012, the music industry’s oldest trade journal started counting digital and streaming sales, not just sales of physical CDs, chartwide.