Payola, Chart Rigging or Both? You Be The Judge! March 26, 2008
Posted by John C in Billboard Hot 100, Madonna, Mariah Carey, music, payola.trackback
Two longtime pop “divas” also made their latest singles available for download yesterday. Madonna did things close to the normal way, releasing her new song, “4 Minutes” to pop radio last week (where it’s already risen to #22 on the Mediabase airplay chart). In the old days, before the era of payola and sales chart manipulation by the record labels, songs were always released to the radio stations and the public for purchase at the same time.
Which leads me to that other diva, the one who’s record label has bought several “#1 hits” on Billboard Hot 100 chart via sales chart manipulation over the past several years. That of course would be Mariah Carey. Do any of you remember the songs “Thank God I Found You,” or “Heartbreaker” by her? I didn’t think so - I’d be shocked if you did actually. What do these songs have in common? Well, neither of them was a hit here in the U.S., the songs reaching #28 and #21 on the U.S. pop airplay charts respectively. What they also have in common is that Mariah’s record label bought #1 positions for both on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart by suppressing downloads for a very long period after the songs were released to radio. I don’t have the exact sales figures, but long story short is that both songs received so many downloads in their first week of availability, that they reached #1 on both the aforementioned chart and on the sales chart. The same thing was also done with her semi-hit singles “My All” (#12) and “Honey” (#10). So, the Billboard Hot 100 record book may say that Mariah has 17 #1 hits. The reality is that only 13 of them can truly be considered #1’s.
Fast forward to today. Mariah released her latest single, “Touch My Body” to radio on February 12th. It was not well received by most listeners, consistently finishing amongst the bottom quarter of the songs rated by pop music listeners at www.ratethemusic.com as published by Mediabase. After a quick ascent into the top 20 of the airplay charts, the song started losing steam quickly, looking like it would peak in the mid teen’s on the pop chart. Songs with the sub 3.40 call-out scores that Mariah’s new song have been garnering typically fall quickly on the chart… for some odd reason though, the song though managed to push it’s way to it’s current position of #8 on the pop airplay chart. There is widespread speculation within both the industry and on various music boards that something funny is happening with this song. Is it a case of payola? It may very well be.
To further matters, Mariah’s label delayed the release of the single for download a full SIX weeks after it went to radio!!! In other words, the sales of the song which would have taken place over a seven week period, are now going to be compressed into ONE week! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that means. Yes, Mariah’s label by next week at this time will have purchased her 5th “#1 hit” on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In two days, it’s already dethroned Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” (which sold almost 220,000 downloads last week - it was released back in December ‘07) from the #1 spot on the iTunes sales chart. A pretty meaningless accomplishment when you consider that you effectively have had 44 days worth of sales crammed into just TWO! It’s high time that Billboard reviewed their chart methodology so that this kind of manipulation will be ended once and for all. The industry will be better for it.
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the shame of it all! mariah should go back to tommy. maybe then she would have some class again
I see what you are trying to say but your article is miss-leading. I see the point that the label may be suppressing downloads but I would classify this as manipulation and NOT the record Label purchasing number ones. At the end of the day the public buy the ’supressed’ downloads and not the Label therefore the methods could be considered by some to be underhand but I dont see any call for payola or purchasing the number 1.
Janet:
The article’s not intended to be misleading as far as the payola goes. Mariah’s song has scored 3.20, 3.38 and 3.38 in it’s first 3 weeks of call-out. These are EXTREMELY poor numbers, especially for someone of Mariah’s stature. Songs that score that poorly typically peak in airplay in 7-8 weeks and then fall just as rapidly as they rose. Mariah’s song was stalling in the mid-teens and following the typical pattern for a song that wasn’t scoring well, gaining only 15-30 spins a day. It then suddenly started picking up spins again at a faster rate. This type of chart run is not at all normal and I (as many others do) suspect payola, much like with Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man” a couple of years ago - it had a very similar unnatural chart life and run.
As for purchasing the #1, that’s more to do with the “suppressed downloads.” It’s pretty easy to cram 7 weeks worth of downloads into 1 week and get a number 1 in sales to get the Hot 100 number 1. Realistically, the 300,000 or so downloads Mariah’s song has gotten to date should be spread out over that time to level the playing field. When you do this, you get a much more realistic picture of things on the sales end. This will be the fifth time Mariah and her label have done this. It’s definitely NOT something to be proud of.
Ok then I think the purchasing thing is just a difference in terminology. But I dont see the point about the airplay. Im not a fan of Ms Carey but I do follow the airplay charts in terms of impressions and spins. I do not know the full story of this song but I do know that it did incredibly well within the first few weeks with airplay. So much so that it charted on the RnB chart with just 6 hours of airplay from the first day it was released to radio. In the begining the song did quite well gaining about 7 million impressions per day which to me was quite unrealsitic but according to sources it wasnt the biggest explosion on airplay history. The song then seemed to level off and now currently gains around 1 million impressions per day. But I will agree with you that the charts are a big farce and have no validity in my eyes. I think they should be based on sales alone and not airplay. Sales speak volumes.
Janet:
I don’t think the airplay charts are a total farce. In reality, they’re less prone to manipulation than the sales charts - it only takes 1 record company to repress downloads. It usually takes a bunch of radio stations to pull off payola.
I’m not sure if you know what call-out research is… bottom line is that the radio stations survey their listeners - this is done throughout the whole U.S. The listeners rate the songs on a 1-5 scale, 1 being horrible, 5 being great. Typically, the “make or break” point for a song is about a 3.55-3.60 score. If a song scores much below this, generally it doesn’t do well on the airplay charts. The song’s first week scores are often about .15-.20 below the rest of the weeks, so a lot of times radio stations and their program directors and music directors will wait until they have enough data on a song to make a judgement - 3 weeks worth is usually enough. Mariah’s song got a lot of spins out of the box, the low early call-out numbers came into the hands of the PD’s and MD’s and they rightfully backed off the song. The most important thing to a radio station is to make money, and you can charge more for ads if you get higher ratings. A song that is not popular lowers your stations total time spent listening (TSL). Songs with low callout typically cause a lot of listeners to flip the dial, which is not what you want. My local station (KIIS), and many others backed off Mariah’s song when the numbers came out… some others (especially in smaller markets) greatly increased the spins, and that’s where the suspicion comes in. In general, payola happens in smaller markets, not the larger ones.
Getting back to call-out scoring, the biggest hits typically score in the 3.80-4.00 range, though some songs such as Timbaland/One Republic’s “Apologize” scored as high as a 4.25 or 4.30!!! Even now, long after it’s chart peak, that song is still scoring in the 3.90’s! People obviously still like it and it’s long chart life is a testament to this as well.
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Didn’t Carrie Underwood’s “So Small” have an interesting rise to the top as well? If I remember correctly, its bullet was really leveling off, and then magically the song rebounded and hit #1. It happens, John. Clips leaked of Mariah’s CD today - and the clips are very promising. “Bye Bye” sounds as if it is going to get Mariah back on track. “Touch My Body” was not a great single for her, but “Bye Bye” will definitely bring back the Mariah we all want to hear!
Greg:
Country radio works quite a bit different than pop radio… That said, a lot of shenanigans happen there as well. Carrie’s “So Small” certainly did have an interesting chart life, but along with EVERY OTHER SONG on the chart at the time was influenced by the Garth Brooks “More Than A Memory” scandal. You may remember that the label pushed to get that song to #1 on the airplay chart in one week. Some stations played the record over 150 times in that first week!!! They succeeded in getting it to #1 in one week in Billboard, but on Mediabase it only reached #4. When you have stations pulling that kind of stuff, every other song suffers… It’s pretty sad that Garth (and/or his label) felt it was necessary to do this, as I think “More Than A Memory” is one of his best songs ever, and it would have gotten to #1 on it’s own, the “normal” way and probably would have had a long run at #1… as it was, it never got to #1 on Mediabase. Thankfully, most of the songs affected (including “So Small”
were able to rebound after the “Garth effect.”
I have heard some of the other Mariah stuff, and it does sound promising. I have no problem with Mariah having legitimate #1’s like “We Belong Together,” & “Don’t Forget About Us.” The good call-out scores supported the airplay that these two songs got.
Do you think “Shake It Off” was a legitamte #1 song? It was #1 in airplay, and the only reason it didn’t hit #1 was because of “Golddigger”, which wasn’t a great song at all.
Greg:
“Shake It Off” was certainly a real number 1, even though I didn’t much care for the song.
Ok on the one hand I kinda agree with what your saying it looks really suspicious to me. But I just read on Billboard.com that Mariah Carey has broken the first week digital sales record beating out the previously held record of Rihanna so I kind of feel that it might be a deserved number 1 afterall.
Kara:
I can’t say it’s at all deserved as what they’ve done is crammed 48 days worth of sales into just 7 days!!! Maybe if she had sold this many downloads the week of February 12th through 17th, this would have some meaning, but what they’ve done is crammed the downloads that SHOULD HAVE happened from February 12th through March 30th into the period of March 24th through March 30th. By doing this, Mariah’s label has bought her “5th #1.” Realistically, we should add together every record’s sales that’s been out for this seven week period and compare their seven week totals. The records by Leona Lewis and Usher for example would dwarf Mariah’s sales when you do this much more realistic comparison.
As it stands, in my eyes, you can still only call about 13 or 14 of her #1’s true ones depending on whether you use Billboard or Mediabase (old Radio & Records).
But the figure is for first week sales so you cant add up sales from different weeks. We can only compare the first week sales of different artists. I would expect Usher’s and Leona’s sales to be higher than Mariah Carey’s since their singles have been out for longer. Maybe after her single has been out for 7 weeks we can then compare the figures. Oh well what can we do somethings in life are not fair but there is nothing we can do. Such a shame.
Kara:
That’s the thing is that Mariah’s label has COMPRESSED 48 days worth of sales into 7 by suppressing the download for such a long time after the song was first heard on the radio. The label does this on purpose to try and get as many people to buy the song in a one week period, thus manipulating the sales chart. If you spread out the download’s Mariah’s song got out over a 48 day period, it’s fewer than 6,000 downloads a day. That’s hardly impressive.
As for this chart manipulation, there is something that can be done about it. Write to Billboard.com and complain about this policy of the record labels, and try to get Billboard to enact a policy which levels the playing field. As is, there are a bunch of songs out there that are masquerading as “#1 hits” that truly aren’t, and Mariah now owns FIVE of them! What’s happening right now is indeed a shame, and a disgrace to the music industry. Billboard really needs to do the right thing and make the changes necessary to legitimatize their sales, Hot 100 and Pop 100 charts.
I don’t think that repressing downloads help all that much. Almost everyone I know downloaded Touch My Body illegally since it wasn’t available on Itunes. Do you think they’re going to legally buy it now? No, so she actually lost sales.
Also she’s getting a lot of airplay on rhythmic and pop stations as well. How do the call out scores look for those?
Actually, Pete the repressed downloads were the main reason she got #1 on the Hot 100 with her latest. Without the repressed downloads, there’s no way she would have gotten there, and it’s precisely why I say it’s at least the 5th Hot 100 #1 her label has bought for her. After only 12 days out (3/24-4/6/08), it already had fallen to #4 on iTunes behind Madonna’s “4 Minutes” (which was only repressed for a week), Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” (which had no repression at all and has been out since before Christmas ‘07), and Lil’ Wayne’s “Lollipop” (also no repression). Look for it to be out of the top 10 in downloads by the end of the week.
The call-out score for Mariah this week at CHR/Pop was an abysmal 3.08 (29th out of 30)… for comparison, Leona scored a 4.10 (#1), and Madonna scored a 4.06 (#2). The airplay is finally reflecting Mariah’s poor callout scores as the song was down in spins at Pop over the previous day for the first time today… look for it to quickly fade into obscurity as it is a FLOP in every sense of the word. Without the Payola it’s gotten to prop into the top 10 at pop radio, and without the 42 days worth of suppressed downloads, it’s nothing.
FYI, Mariah and her label have been at this for years… check out this article:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E7D61639F936A15752C0A960958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
I still think she overall lost customers by repressing her downloads. Yeah she got that initial surge but would have had much more sales by now if she would have released it earlier. Again a lot of people already had the song before it was available for downloads.
I don’t think you can rely too much on call out scores anyway since most people sign up multiple times just to pimp their favorite artists.
It indeed is quite possible that she lost some overall sales due to her record company’s chart-rigging antics. Bottom line though is that effectively 48 days worth of sales were compressed into 7 which works out to less than 6,000 downloads a day… Pure and simple, this was chart rigging at it’s worst and is why Billboard needs to institute policies or a formula to counteract the rigging. It’s no wonder that the Hot 100 has no credibility within the industry today.
As for call-out, it’s next to impossible to rig. The truly HUGE hits score high right out of the box and stay there for a long time. Songs such as Timbaland/One Republic’s “Apologize” and Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” are current examples of this kind of huge hit. If you want to go back a few years, check out the call-out scores that Avril Lavigne’s MASSIVE first hit “Complicated” received… it was in the 4.20’s and even 4.30’s! The flops, such as Mariah’s current song and Snoop Dogg’s “Sensual Seduction” consistently score toward the bottom (high 2’s to low 3’s) week after week. Even if a person were to sign up 10 times, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference as they survey 10’s of thousands of users every week. Also, they do track IP addresses to counter multiple id’s. Read the fine print and the terms of service/usage at such sites as RateTheMusic.com if you don’t believe me.
Mariah is not the only one to do this. Rihanna did it with Umbrella. And Fergie did this with Glamorous, which her label made it unavailable for download for close to 7 weeks. Are these not true #1s either?
Very true about Rihanna and Fergie. Mariah though does it far more than anyone else in the biz. That said, Rihanna’s song and Fergie’s song both got to #2 in pop airplay. With rigged sales, I don’t consider either of them “true #1’s” either, though they really didn’t have the kind of spin rigging on the Pop charts that Mariah did. “Umbrella” was a good enough song on it’s own. It could have gotten to #1 in sales without the stigma of repressed downloads.
Mariah’s bullet slowed to 25-30 spin/day increases and it looked like it would peak in the mid-teens… Then it suddenly in a few days went up to 90-100 spin/day increases thanks to the smaller market station payola she got. That said, even with the payola, Mariah could barely crack the top 10 in pop airplay.
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I don’t buy your payola claims. Evidence shows that radio stations don’t rely just on call out numbers. Evidence also shows that callout numbers are not an accurate reflection on what’s popular. Touch My Body is still in the top 5 as far as downloads go but doing poorly on call outs. Apparently a lot of people like the song or it wouldnt be getting the sales it’s getting.
Pete:
I don’t think you understand the whole payola process and how it works. When a song starts slowing down in airplay at pop radio to the point where it’s looking like it’s going to stall in the teens on the chart and then the call-out scores come in and tell the stations that their listeners aren’t liking the song, 99% of the time, that song is going to peak in airplay in week 6 or 7, and then start falling down the chart. TMB has scored in the bottom quarter of the call-out chart it’s ENTIRE run and has been amongst the bottom 3 songs 4 of 6 weeks!!! As you can see by the last two weeks, the numbers are getting WORSE!
Week 1: 3.20 ( 28 out of 30 )
Week 2: 3.38 ( 24 )
Week 3: 3.38 ( 23 )
Week 4: 3.25 ( 28 )
Week 5: 3.08 ( 29 )
Week 6: 3.06 ( 28 )
The one true thing you do say her is that radio stations don’t rely just on call-out numbers. They are a tool and when used properly, they help a station get higher ratings, which leads to higher ad rates, and of course more revenue. Ratings = money. And call-out is the single most important thing the PD’s use to make decisions on songs. When you go against what your call-out scores are saying, you risk losing listeners. Sometimes PD’s do go with their gut instincts, and some do have a real feel for their audience. Truth be told though that even the best PD’s aren’t infallible and their gut will lead them wrong sometimes.
Call-out scores are the single most non-biased way of finding out what is popular and what is not popular. The numbers can’t be rigged, and that’s the beauty of it.
The downloads were suppressed for 42 days with TMB, so the reality is that the song is only selling more now because people couldn’t buy it when it first came out as with most songs. Also, when an artist has a fanbase as big as Mariah, they’re going to buy anything that is put out no matter what the quality. I liken this to Gwen Stefani’s song “Wind It Up” or Britney Spears’ “Gimme More.” The fanbases bought these songs like crazy when they first came out just because of the artist and both were flops on the radio. Like with Mariah, both Gwen and Britney have huge fanbases, unlike her, they didn’t get the payola help from her label to get her song into the top 10 pop airplay… By definition, the larger the fanbase, the more possible sales you’re going to have.
John, you’re so right about all of this garbage that Mariah and her lable have been pulling forever. Thanks for enlightening others and standing up for what is right. It’s quite a shame about the mockry that Billboard has become in large part due to Ms.Carey.
Great blog. Mariah’s #1’s are so fraudulent. First she dates and then marries the most powerful man in the business, which in turn gave her more promotion and airplay than the other artists on the label. Since that didn’t get all her songs to the top (ex. Can’t Let Go - #2 and Make It Happen - #5), they had to devise a series of chart scams to get her songs to #1, like that story with One Sweet Day and then limiting Celine Dion’s Because You Loved Me single so that her song Always Be My Baby could get to #1.
After she divorced Tommy Mottola, they started repressing her singles and selling them for way less than the competition (ex. Honey, My All, Heartbreaker, Thank God I Found You and Loverboy - which fortunately stalled at #2). There was also some scam with Through The Rain where commercials counted as spins or something, but fortunately it didn’t work. Despite massive airplay for We Belong Together it also had a chart scam with free downloads giving it an extra 1-2 weeks at #1. Don’t Forget About Us and Touch My Body were both repressed for weeks and then sales dropped like a bomb after the first week.
[quote]Mariah is not the only one to do this. Rihanna did it with Umbrella. And Fergie did this with Glamorous, which her label made it unavailable for download for close to 7 weeks. Are these not true #1s either?[quote]
Those songs both sold over 2 million copies. I bet Touch My Body won’t reach those sales.
Nancy and Mark - GREAT posts! And I vividly remember some of those CD singles of Mariah’s for her “#1 hits” in the mid-late 1990’s going for ,49 cents in Tower Records and many other outlets. Not only did they go for .49 cents, but there were hardly any songs out as singles at the time to compete with them for sales position!
Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Fergie’s “Glamorous” indeed were hits on their own and they did sell as you say over 2 million copies… it’s sad though that they have to have this stigma of “repressed downloads” attached to them. Rihanna has another song moving up the charts called “Take A Bow” - it’s #15 currently… sadly, it’s not available for download yet. Apparently they’re going to repress it until late May. I actually like the song quite a bit, but as a form of protest I WILL NOT BUY IT when it becomes available for download. This practice of buying Hot 100 #1’s needs to stop, or Billboard needs to make their sales chart a rolling 5 week sales average so that every song gets a fair shake.