THE LACK OF TRANSPARENCY ON BILLBOARD HOT 100.

The purpose of music charts is to know the population's music preferences. The counting on these charts must be very transparent to know what are the most successful tracks in a country. The songs on the top of the charts are considered hits and will define the year in music in a certain country.

The charts have also a less positive side :the consequences for an artist to be on top of the charts. Every artist wants to be successful and spread their own music, but, besides that, the effects of having a song on the top 10 are really big. Contrats for advertising brands succeed in a little period of time if your music is successful. You, as an artist, become the center of attention. At the same time, the pressure increases: If you haven't released an album yet, you will have to do it before people lose interest on you. At least, you must drop an EP or another single (so good as the successful one). The one-hit-wonder fobia put pressure on artists that desperately search another song in their catalogue that will do well on the charts.

Sometimes, the pressure doesn't become from the artists themselves but their records labels. If an artist had a number one with their previous album, they better have another one on the following one.

The pressure increases a lot more if you had had a number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It is the most important chart of the word,not only because is the US chart, but having a number one on this may lead you to be under the radar for awards and incredible success. The US, with a population of 320 million people, opens a new market. If a song is successful there, it can easily reach the 100 million streams on Spotify.

That's why artists want their songs to do well on the charts and they want their fans to buy, stream and listen to their songs as much as possible. There have been examples as Justin Bieber desperately encouraging his fans to buy/stream/play Yummy, so he could get the number 1 on Billboard, later used by Lil Nas x to promote 'Call Me By Your Name'. 

This all leads to mask the true chart results and they get artificial. However, lately, this seems to be on the chart itself, on the Billboard Hot 100!

On March the 3rd, controversy began when Billboard incorporated the views of Facebook videos as streams. If you watch just 3 seconds of a video in this platform, this will get counted as a view. In YouTube, it's 11-30 seconds. This harms transparency and leads, again, to false positions on the charts. 

Another polemical episode had place at the beginning of April when Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber and Demi Lovato's manager) announced that Justin Bieber's Peaches will remain for a second week on the top of the chart before it officially came out. According to him, a member of Billboard's staff sent him an email that day saying congratulations for the number one. After a few hours, Billboard unveiled the top 10 with a new number one: Lil Nas X's Call me by your name. This opens the time for doing questions. Which was the true number one? Was it actually 'Peaches' or it was only Scooter Braun 's desire to remain at the top? 

Billboard should had solved the problem with transparency, showing the real data, but it only showed the results. 

This also reflects how important it was to Scooter to remain on top, not being satisfied with having a number one for a week, improving Justin' s success on Changes. This is leading to a not-number-one fobia: #2, #3, #4, #5... They are all great spots for a song. A song is a hit even if it doesn't get to the top. 

The peak of the lack of transparency on Billboard this year happened in May. The Billboard Hot 100 was supposed to be updated on May 18th, according to Billboard. Without no explanation, the chart wasn't uploaded until May 19th. The number one that week was Leave the Door Open by Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak. It was weird because, throughout the whole week, it was said that Dua Lipa will score her first number one with Levitating (ft DaBaby). Later,when the chart was unveiled, 4.3k sales were removed from Levitating. Apparently, these sales were removed because they weren't valid (they were bought through the singer's website with fake US addresses). Somehow, the two days of wait make this questionable. Were the two days included on the counting? The transparency is not so clear. 

    (via @chartdata on Twitter) 

This summer we're having another chapter and it's about digital sales. Digital sales are a part of Billboard counting. Usually, hits have around 5k or least, but the late BTS hits have 100k or more of Digital sales. This is massive. A person can buy 4 times a song in the US. This means that maybe sales could be, according to this rule, the quadruple of the persons that have bought them. This increases incredibly the chart position. This week BTS has replaced themselves at the top of the charts, with Butter and Permission to dance. It seems  artificial because their latest single is number 9 on Spotify today.

With BTS we see every fobia I've been analysing: the fobia of not having another number one (by the fans in  case of BTS) increasing artificially the chart position and the lack of transparency on Billboard, who should show the chart data clearly. Billboard can't lose credibility in order to keep its status as the biggest chart of the world. 

     (via @chartdata on Twitter)