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Post by michaelhagerty on Feb 6, 2016 11:03:55 GMT -5
^Great to have your input. Your statement about 'lumping free plays' is a good example of why I have always thought airplay is not a good indicator of a song's popularity. So put me down as favoring the pre-1981 charts as being more accurate since they relied solely on sales based on what you have posted. And that is reflected in late 1974 with the big charts drops since a recession had begun by then. (Charts being based solely on sales will be effected by recessions and such). But let's remember that album sales continued to grow through the recession. The singles sales decline and continued album growth were more about demographics. A larger chunk of Baby Boomers were in their late teen and young adult years and FM album rock stations were taking more and more of them away from Top 40 stations. As a result, they went from buying the singles they heard on Top 40 to buying the albums they were hearing multiple cuts from on FM.
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Post by michaelhagerty on Feb 6, 2016 11:28:16 GMT -5
Talking about the accuracy of the charts one of the most interesting charts comparisons is the week of March 23, 1974. # 1 on Cash Box is Rock On by David Essex while that same song is # 12 on Billboard after having peaked at #5 --2 weeks earlier. I know that Cash Box was a sales only chart until 1977 while Billboard was a combination of sales and airplay but WOW! By the way, Cher's Dark Lady was #1 at Billboard that week and that song peaked at #3 that same week on Cash Box. In 1974, Billboard wasn't using airplay as a weighting factor in its Hot 100 chart numbers. And the sales figures were wholesale, not retail. Cash Box factored in jukebox play, which was another flawed methodology. Using my analogy of airplay figuring into a chart as being like a car manufacturer counting every time you see one of their cars on the street as a sale, factoring in jukebox play is like counting every time someone rents a car as a sale of that car. It also helps to remember the world we were living in back then (I covered some of this in my original post at RadioDiscussions.com, but that was three years ago and spread over several pages of give and take). We didn't have the internet, FedEx and free (or even cheap) long distance. Getting sales information from a meaningful sample of stores was prohibitively expensive. Calling two record stores in each of the 20 biggest cities is 40 long distance phone calls a week. And Cash Box was always working with a fraction of Billboard's budget. Both were getting a specific (but not always accurate) account of the number of copies of any given record shipped at wholesale from the record labels themselves. So the first few weeks of any record on either chart reflected copies going to stores...not leaving the store in the hands of paying retail customers. Both would bolster that with calls to a handful of record stores around the country, some input from radio (whether it was actually a weighting factor in the chart number varied depending on the year) and in Cash Box's case, jukebox play. Ultimately, neither magazine gave a truly accurate picture of what people were buying at retail.
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Post by michaelhagerty on Feb 6, 2016 11:42:39 GMT -5
I wonder what the chart would have looked like in the 70s and 80s had the system that was used in the mid 90s and on been available back then. You mean if Soundscan had existed and there'd been an actual reflection of retail sales? It would have been much different. Most likely you'd have seen fewer number ones and fewer top tens, with longer stays at the top.
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Post by michaelhagerty on Feb 6, 2016 11:56:05 GMT -5
And to return to the original topic of this thread, big drop-offs:
It's important to understand the huge role wholesale shipments played in Billboard's methodology. That's where the bulk of the numbers came from. And the upward climb on the Hot 100 is additional stores stocking a given record and (in the case of true hits), re-ordering to replenish stock that has sold to actual paying retail customers.
So when the record slows down at retail, the record stores don't order more. Wholesale shipments come to an abrupt end. And that's where you see records fall from the upper third of the chart all the way off. The record might still be selling at retail, but not enough for the stores to feel confident re-stocking.
Apart from novelty records, actual retail buyers don't behave like that. There's not a sudden mass "off" switch where no one buys that record. It's a gradual tail-off. And if we'd had Soundscan back in the day, those records likely would have had a gradual trip down the chart.
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Post by djjoe1960 on Feb 6, 2016 13:37:55 GMT -5
Michael,
One other thing that is noteworthy is that if you look at the charts from the 1960's (Cash Box or Billboard) you will notice that nearly every song that made the Top 10 fell through the 30's or 40's down the chart and then usually exited the whole 100 the next week. As you say, perhaps record stores stopped reordering singles that seemed to peak in popularity but that doesn't mean that they still weren't selling. As you also mentioned in the other post, the music trade publications weren't necessarily geared for mass consumption (the public) but when AT40 began airing nation wide in the 1970's--it gave the public at large a chance to know (as Casey used to say) "how your favorite songs are doing on the national charts". Now whether any of those charts pre-Soundscan were really accurate is another story. Although I would say that most songs that made the Top 10 were indeed selling well and getting lots of play (radio & juke boxes). I know from some personal experience as I worked in radio and a retail store in the 1980's.
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Post by michaelhagerty on Feb 6, 2016 14:13:20 GMT -5
Michael, One other thing that is noteworthy is that if you look at the charts from the 1960's (Cash Box or Billboard) you will notice that nearly every song that made the Top 10 fell through the 30's or 40's down the chart and then usually exited the whole 100 the next week. As you say, perhaps record stores stopped reordering singles that seemed to peak in popularity but that doesn't mean that they still weren't selling. As you also mentioned in the other post, the music trade publications weren't necessarily geared for mass consumption (the public) but when AT40 began airing nation wide in the 1970's--it gave the public at large a chance to know (as Casey used to say) "how your favorite songs are doing on the national charts". Now whether any of those charts pre-Soundscan were really accurate is another story. Although I would say that most songs that made the Top 10 were indeed selling well and getting lots of play (radio & juke boxes). I know from some personal experience as I worked in radio and a retail store in the 1980's. DJ Joe: That's true. If stores made large final orders of a given single, there could be significant numbers sold after the record had vanished from the chart. In fact, some of those records may have been selling better than songs fairly high up the chart. I agree that most songs that made the Top 10 over the course of a few weeks were genuine hits selling well at retail. Stuff that jumped into the top 10 fast and fell off fast may well have been big wholesale shipments that didn't sell big at retail (the classic example is the "Sgt. Pepper" movie soundtrack in 1978). But anything below #15 (and on some weeks, even #11 or #12) is chancy and out of the Top 20, you're not really talking about a hit. Look at it this way: The Hot 100 was not cumulative. It didn't total up sales to reach a peak position over the life of the record. Instead, it was a snapshot of a seven-day period. Now, take a record that peaked at #25. On its best week, there were 24 records doing better. And, the dirty little secret is that the vast majority of people couldn't then or now name 24 currently popular records. For most, it's five, seven, maybe....maybe....ten. So even a record that peaks at #10 is a record that.... on its best week...had nine records that were bigger.
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Post by bestmusicexpert on Feb 8, 2016 17:30:28 GMT -5
When I do my 60's countdown, I tend to see a good amount that falls from above 20-25.
Above meaning closer to #1...
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Post by doofus67 on Sept 5, 2016 20:55:24 GMT -5
Conspiracy theory time: The now deceased Hot 100 chart manager from the early 1970s through early 1983 - was a controversial figure. There have been plenty of online discussions devoted to suspicions over chart manipulation and favoritism of certain records under his management. Even a certain Chartbeat columnist commented once that the Hot 100 was a mess under his rule. In early 1983, he was fired, and that is when the chart started to settle down. It is conceivable that he was let go because the Hot 100 was getting far too unreliable by 1982. Pure conjecture, but maybe it was not a chart methodology leading to 1982's messy and bizarre chart moves, but one man's unreliability...? That's interesting. Can you point me to where I would find any of those online discussions? Also, the discussion about the former Chartbeat columnist about the Hot 100 "being a mess" - this is the first I've heard of that. I assume it was the gentleman who initiated the Chartbeat column in the early '80s? I'd love to hear more about this... A great place to start is right here on this board. Of all the highly interesting threads, this one is my personal favorite: at40fg.proboards.com/thread/2089/chart-manipulations
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Post by doofus67 on Sept 5, 2016 21:08:53 GMT -5
I've read articles back and forth about the relative inaccuracy of charts prior to computerization/Soundscan. Came across this when googling Wardlow's history. Thought it's specifically about a Carpenters song, it mentions many key issues. Specifically key is Mr. Hagerty's take: www.amcorner.com/forum/threads/goofus-re-evaluated.13167/page-2Just read it three years later. Wow. What an eye opener!
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Post by doofus67 on Sept 5, 2016 23:29:02 GMT -5
And to return to the original topic of this thread, big drop-offs: It's important to understand the huge role wholesale shipments played in Billboard's methodology. That's where the bulk of the numbers came from. And the upward climb on the Hot 100 is additional stores stocking a given record and (in the case of true hits), re-ordering to replenish stock that has sold to actual paying retail customers. So when the record slows down at retail, the record stores don't order more. Wholesale shipments come to an abrupt end. And that's where you see records fall from the upper third of the chart all the way off. The record might still be selling at retail, but not enough for the stores to feel confident re-stocking. Apart from novelty records, actual retail buyers don't behave like that. There's not a sudden mass "off" switch where no one buys that record. It's a gradual tail-off. And if we'd had Soundscan back in the day, those records likely would have had a gradual trip down the chart. Hooray! There it is a nutshell: the answer to the big, burning, million-dollar question, How does Air Supply's "Even the Nights Are Better" lose so much popularity in seven days' time to justify dropping it from #6 to #42? In the 18-year original run of Casey's shows, no other record fell out of the top 40 from a higher spot. (By the way, this was the first big dropoff to come to mind when I saw the subject of this thread. It's surprising that no one mentioned it.) This has been some very enlightening commentary. The ups and downs of these songs will never make perfect sense -- which is precisely what has made them so much fun to look at, keep track of, and write about. It's no exaggeration that to get this kind of insight into what was making things tick is exhilarating!
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Post by jlthorpe on Sept 6, 2016 20:03:58 GMT -5
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Post by doofus67 on Sept 6, 2016 22:51:27 GMT -5
Good stuff! There's a thread that should have gone on a lot longer. I've never studied the country charts of the '80s very closely. But, without having any issue reprints handy, I'm thinking this movement pattern, this assembly line of a chart, lasted the entire decade. The country chart was the first to be converted to BDS, right?
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Post by mitchm on Sept 7, 2016 10:59:50 GMT -5
Good stuff! There's a thread that should have gone on a lot longer. I've never studied the country charts of the '80s very closely. But, without having any issue reprints handy, I'm thinking this movement pattern, this assembly line of a chart, lasted the entire decade. The country chart was the first to be converted to BDS, right? If you go to "This week's 80's show" thread pages 1267 & 1268 there is some more discussion on the turnover of Country #1's during the 80's, mostly by me. I'm glad those days are long gone.
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Post by johnnywest on Sept 7, 2016 19:53:03 GMT -5
And to return to the original topic of this thread, big drop-offs: It's important to understand the huge role wholesale shipments played in Billboard's methodology. That's where the bulk of the numbers came from. And the upward climb on the Hot 100 is additional stores stocking a given record and (in the case of true hits), re-ordering to replenish stock that has sold to actual paying retail customers. So when the record slows down at retail, the record stores don't order more. Wholesale shipments come to an abrupt end. And that's where you see records fall from the upper third of the chart all the way off. The record might still be selling at retail, but not enough for the stores to feel confident re-stocking. Apart from novelty records, actual retail buyers don't behave like that. There's not a sudden mass "off" switch where no one buys that record. It's a gradual tail-off. And if we'd had Soundscan back in the day, those records likely would have had a gradual trip down the chart. Hooray! There it is a nutshell: the answer to the big, burning, million-dollar question, How does Air Supply's "Even the Nights Are Better" lose so much popularity in seven days' time to justify dropping it from #6 to #42? In the 18-year original run of Casey's shows, no other record fell out of the top 40 from a higher spot. (By the way, this was the first big dropoff to come to mind when I saw the subject of this thread. It's surprising that no one mentioned it.) This has been some very enlightening commentary. The ups and downs of these songs will never make perfect sense -- which is precisely what has made them so much fun to look at, keep track of, and write about. It's no exaggeration that to get this kind of insight into what was making things tick is exhilarating! Here are some more big recent AT40 drops, although this mostly had to do with recurrent rules: She Bangs – Ricky Martin (2000) (from #17) Music – Madonna (2000) (from #15) Dance With Me – Debelah Morgan (2001) (from #12) Never Had A Dream Come True – S Club 7 (2001) (from #13) You Make Me Sick – Pink (2001) (from #16) Only Time – Enya (2001) (from #13) Sing - Ed Sheeran (2014) (from #16) When We Were Young - Adele (2016) (from #18) And on Rick Dees Weekly Top 40, in early 2013, "Die Young" fell from #1 off the chart, not because it had lost that much airplay, but because of Sandy Hook.
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Post by jimjterrell4210 on Dec 24, 2017 20:52:18 GMT -5
A couple of examples from 1984:
"99 Luftballoons" from Nena fell 36 notches, from #28 to #64, on April 21, 1984 "Holding Out for a Hero" from Bonnie Tyler also fell 36 notches, from #34 to #70, on May 5, 1984
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