Tedium - Gaming The Charts 🎸

How Casey Kasem made the Billboard charts important to more than insiders

I learned something really interesting when researching the very first episode of American Top 40, which fittingly aired the weekend of July 4, 1970.

That interesting thing? If you take out all the songs and commercials, a three-hour program becomes just 20 minutes long. Its host, Casey Kasem, a veteran DJ and television host who by this time was dabbling in voice acting, was adept at filling this 20 minutes with banter, interesting facts, and perspectives about the music that was soaring on the charts. He would continue to do so on American Top 40 for 18 years—then, after a decade-long gap in which Shadoe Stevens was handed the baton and he was hosting a competing show, another six more.

It was infotainment—and while odds are low that people were listening to the show straight through, all three hours, it was perfect for grazing.

(In case you’re wondering: Yes, Kasem ended the very first broadcast by saying his signature line: “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.”)

That three-hour program evolved but never changed significantly in structure over the years, but its format was quietly important for a few reasons: It got people interested in consuming information in a list-based form, and it didn’t play to the biases of the day—instead, focusing on the objective goals of the chart.

As a 2014 piece published on Splinter (then known as Fusion) and timed to Kasem’s passing notes, the first chart featured “Ohio,” a song by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young that was successful (ranking at number 30 that week) despite the fact that some AM stations actively were not playing the song about the National Guard shootings at Kent State.

In introducing the song, Kasem didn’t sugarcoat it. Instead, he highlighted the vocal quartet’s pedigree and the fact that such a message was not out of character for the group.

“Those are heavy credentials, and you expect heavy stuff from them,” Kasem stated over the song’s introductory riff.

Billboard writer Rich Appel, speaking to Splinter, noted that the decision to stick to the chart reflected a noble goal: “That was one of the things ‘American Top 40’ did: They wanted to just play the top 40 songs, regardless of what (mainstream) radio was doing.”

Casey Kasem, on an episode of “The People Next Door,” circa 1989. (via IMDb)

And it’s worth noting that, for decades, Billboard was not exactly a publication known outside of the music industry—for one thing, you couldn’t buy it at a local grocery store. Kasem and his broadcaster were providing a basic resource to the public: He was counting down the charts, often on AM stations, and helping to make listeners aware of music that the station wasn’t playing any other time of the week.

“Because Billboard’s formula back then took overall album sales into account, listeners who generally stuck to AM radio got to hear music off albums that hadn’t necessarily produced hit singles yet,” writer Jessica Roy wrote.

Eventually, the information on the chart would become more democratized—particularly during the late ’90s, as the internet helped to make Billboard easier to access. (The magazine, through its history, has paywalled many of its charts, then made them freely available; in recent years, they’ve gone back to paywalled.)

By that time, the chart situation had complicated significantly on the radio dial: American Top 40 had been handed off to Stevens, who (no kidding) became famous by doing a series of fast-talking commercials for an electronics retailer. Stevens eventually ended his tenure at American Top 40, while Kasem had moved onto his own show, ‌Casey’s Top 40, and a number of secondary charts for different formats. In 1998, after a decade away, Kasem came back to American Top 40—and the show moved away from using Billboard entirely. These days the show, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, uses a proprietary chart.

But even if American Top 40, nearing its 52nd anniversary, isn’t exactly leading the way with the charts anymore, you can argue it remains an important starting point for chart culture. The film industry’s box-office charts later gained similar cultural cachet. And while other charts, such as the New York Times Bestseller List, existed before then, you can argue that their influence probably rose in the years after the music industry gave charts a popular showcase.

And this can be seen in the fact that many modern services, such as Apple Music and Spotify, have built popular charts of their own that people legitimately care about, even if they can’t be considered quite the same way as Billboard because they don’t cover every nook and cranny of the pop charts.

And thinking more broadly: One can probably draw a line from the popularity contests of Billboard to the way it seems like we rank everything online, from Amazon popularity charts to listicles. We’re always counting on something, and it makes sense that we want to make the best possible appearance when we do.

Amos Lee’s Mission Bell, a reminder that the easiest way for an artist to top the charts is to release an album in the middle of January.

Five other ways that artists and labels have successfully gamed the Billboard charts

1. The January sleeper hit. In the early 2010s, an odd phenomenon kept happening at the beginning of the year—artists with cult followings were topping the Billboard 200 with extremely low numbers of sales. A great example of this is Amos Lee’s Mission Bell, a chart-topping album that sold just 40,000 copies in its first week in January of 2011—an impressive number for Lee, who has never gotten near that single-week sales number before or since—but at the time, a nadir for the album charts that’s since been lowered. A couple weeks before that, the ’90s alt-rock band Cake did the same thing with their first album in seven years. They sold 4,000 more units than Lee did. “The increasingly low bar for topping Billboard’s album chart suggests that it may not mean very much to have a Number One record anymore,” Rolling Stone noted at the time. Nonetheless, taking advantage of a lack of wattage on the charts is an effective way of building exposure for an artist on the charts.

2. The iTunes effect. In 2005, Billboard changed its rules for single sales to allow digital downloads to count for the chart, and one of the biggest beneficiaries was a solo artist who, as a member of a alt-rock band, missed a chance to top the pop charts for a couple of months in a row because of Billboard’s dumb rules. Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,“ released two months after changes to digital download rules, was catapulted to further success thanks to users who were buying the single on iTunes en masse. “In the early months of the digital-powered Hot 100, no song benefited more from the new formula than Stefani’s bananas anthem,” music writer Chris Molanphy wrote in the Village Voice. (Another direct beneficiary was piano man Ben Folds, currently the artistic advisor for the National Symphony Orchestra, whose biggest Hot 100 hit, to this day, is a profane cover of an NWA song.)

3. The sales-only Hot 100 appearance. By the mid-’90s, bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Pearl Jam were established enough that they could release physical CD singles that would sell well enough in record stores that they would chart on the Hot 100 with a song or short EP clearly targeted towards their existing fanbases—without a smidgen of pop radio play. Their fans weren’t just listeners—they were collectors. Which is why NIN’s “The Day the World Went Away,” a particularly pop-unfriendly song, was very briefly a top 20 hit in early 1999, as well as why Pearl Jam’s Merkin Ball, a two-song EP intended as a companion to Neil Young’s Pearl Jam-featuring album Mirror Ball, is the band’s second-highest chart appearance on the Hot 100.

4. The live album saturation strategy. Speaking of Pearl Jam, the band came across one of the most brilliant chart stunts in modern history in 2000, when is started releasing a series of “official bootlegs,” which aimed to provide a better experience to fans than poorly recorded stuff from the crowds. The band released 72 separate albums over a two-year period, in what can literally be called a flood-the-market strategy. The result of this trick, due to Pearl Jam being one of the biggest bands in the world at the time, was that the band managed to chart 14 albums in a single week. Which is a lot. “It’s good to throw a wrench in the way the record industry is run and do something different,” bassist Jeff Ament said of the endeavor in 2003.

5. The chorus-only YouTube video. No matter your opinion of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” or PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” you must argue that the YouTube-driven songs played a key role in the internet’s growing influence on the Billboard Hot 100, even if they themselves never topped the charts in the U.S. Which is why it makes sense that, in February of 2013, the magazine announced it was adding YouTube streams to its mix, which seemed to directly influence the Hot 100 success of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” a song that generally wasn’t even played with a primary music video. The problem? The rules were loosey goosey—enough so that, in 2017, Post Malone gained chart mojo from a version of his single “rockstar” that was effectively a three-and-a-half-minute-long loop of the chorus. It was a brilliant move, but this was too far for Billboard, which adjusted the YouTube methodology in 2017.

In some ways, Billboard is at the height of its influence, with a long-running awards show and a general interest in ranking stuff in general helping to give prominence to the magazine that did it first.

But there’s a problem that has emerged over time—for all the times artists have flipped the script on what has proven to be a fairly rigid chart, and for all the changes Billboard itself has made to the chart to account for structural changes to the music industry in the past 60 years, it remains hopelessly imperfect.

Part of the reason for that is that Billboard is very much a part of the industry it reports on, meaning that it can be swayed by things such as traditionalist views on the country charts, which very notably came to the forefront during Lil Nas X’s long chart reign with “Old Town Road,” which excelled on the pop charts after the song was removed from the country charts—and caught Billboard flat-footed.

However, Billboard has gotten smarter about gaming behavior, and in 2020 put its foot down against a practice that had gotten downright widespread among some massively famous artists: bundling. The practice, which worked so well for Prince that Billboard effectively changed its rules to prevent the practice for a time, came back in a big way in the late 2010s, as digital music made the idea of bundling even more viable.

A 2018 piece from Genius noted that, in 2017 alone, 14 separate albums from a variety of artists—including pop icons like Katy Perry, P!nk, and Kesha, as well as rock mainstays like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and The Killers—had leveraged the bundling practice for concert tickets and merchandise, and topped the charts as a result. The approach, which doesn’t count a sale unless the buyer redeems the album, gave a lot of extra sales to artists that might not dominate streaming in quite the same way that, say, Drake can.

However, this approach became problematic during the pandemic, when concert tours were getting cancelled anyway, which led Billboard to shift its rules. The shift is this: The album can’t be included in the price of the ticket or shirt, but is an opt-in add-on made clear to buyers.

Who knows if that method will hold up. But considering the importance of a strong chart appearance, any strategy to game the charts likely will emerge at some point—bundle or no bundle.

Nobody will ever accuse Kate Bush of doing this, by the way, because she never tours.

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