While Splish Splash is for sure an enduring masterpiece, I can’t say that these songs didn’t all eventually put me to sleep—not because they were bad, but because popular music in 1958 was gentle, staid, and fairly simple. Jaunty? Yes, you could say that, but in the same way that…like…a carousel is jaunty. (I wonder what these people would think of their fellow Hot 100 alumna WAP, but I digress.)

 

Here’s the thing, though—I’m equally bored by the today’s top songs, but for a different reason. They’re redundant, flashy yet somehow also soporific, and—more times than not—vapid; the sad, sad rubble of a sonic golden age that ended not too long ago. (Of course there are exceptions. I lend my full faith and admiration to artists like Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, Chloe x Halle, etc. Heck, I’ll say it…I even liked "Driver’s License!") The difference between 1958 and now is that we have free access to nearly all of the greatest songs made over the past century (and then some). The ceaseless pursuit of hit-making seems trivial amid our current proximity to the perennial works of David Berman, David Bowie, and David Byrne—just to name a few. My point is not that artists should give up, but that Billboard should. Ranking music now is much more consequential and misleading than it was pre-internet.

 

Is this to say that the Hot 100 was ever an accurate barometer of popular music taste prior to the digital age? Absolutely not. Music charts were dismayingly fraudulent in their early days, relying on human accounting rather than any sort of objective machinery. Record labels viewed this honor system as an opportunity to augment the success of their own music by flippantly bribing music store employees with free albums and concert tickets (…and random appliances such as refrigerators and microwaves!); this ensured that the biggest artists with the biggest representation remained on top. On the flip side, music store employees sought to wield their own influence on the industry by underreporting sales for music they disliked. As this corruption persisted, the legitimacy of the Hot 100 suffered. Fans grew disengaged due to their minimal influence over the rankings, which were dictated by reported sales and radio airplay.

 

Seeking greater credibility and prestige, Billboard made the transition to concrete data analytics with their 1991 Soundscan partnership. Soundscan—a reliable bellwether to this day—functions as a digital bookkeeper of countrywide music consumption. By recording almost all scanned music purchases, Soundscan developed a database that accurately reflected the purchasing habits of American listeners in real time. Less than a year later, radio analytics (the other variable in the Hot 100 equation) turned digital as well upon Billboard’s acquisition of Broadcast Data Systems. For the first time, music charts were cleansed of the shameless corruption that record labels so frequently employed. The result? A transition of power that would shift the music industry rapidly and indelibly.

 

The advent of digital accounting brought authentic representation to music listeners by ensuring that their purchases were spoken for. In this sense, the notion that money begets influence remained a constant theme within the industry—whichever songs fans purchased the most were the ones that landed at the top of the charts. Much to the dismay of record labels, this proletariat taste proved to be pretty darn divergent from their own agenda.

 

You see, the word of mouth system that preceded Soundscan was flawed for more reasons than just bribery, among them being the fact that music stores often feigned data to skew toward what they assumed Billboard and labels wanted to see. This meant a lot of guesstimating took place in order to align with the misconception that popular music was synonymous with the pop genre; stores would inflate their reported pop sales in an effort to appear consistent with the Hot 100’s strong pop lineage. It should come as no surprise, then, to see how pop-saturated the charts were prior to the implementation of Soundscan.

 

The introduction of Soundscan negated this relative homogeneity almost instantaneously. Shop owners’ book cooking turned out to be grossly unrepresentative of their customers’ listening habits—it turns out that pop wasn’t the only genre people wanted to purchase. Rather, data analytics unearthed America’s entrenched love for country, R&B, hip-hop, metal, and alternative music. Charts once topped by the likes of Madonna, Cher, Bon Jovi, and Mariah Carey were soon infiltrated with the grunge and grit of Metallica, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Coolio, and Beck. The industry was witnessing the most dramatic upheaval of popular music taste to ever occur, and everyone was freaking out.

 

What happened next was a dizzying cycle of charts influencing radio influencing TV influencing sales influencing charts, etc. To be clear, the whole country didn’t start liking Nirvana right at midnight on January 1, 1990 (although, having barely lived through the 90’s myself, that’s just kind of how I assumed things worked back then). Like many celebrated grunge acts from that period, Nirvana gained momentum in Seattle’s underground scene in the late 80’s. Their label, Sub Pop, sought to circumvent record stores by distributing singles through a monthly subscription service instead. This tactic enabled Sub Pop to influence what their target audience was exposed to while forgoing the price tag of record store bribery.

 

The release of Nirvana’s first Sub Pop single (“Love Buzz”) set off an unprecedented snowball effect. Gaining quick notoriety among Sub Pop’s network of subscribers, they soon evolved from being a niche regional act to a steady presence among the college radio landscape. Their freshman album Bleach added an eponymous fuel to the fire of this growing fanbase, with consistent sales helping the band emerge on Soundscan’s radar and ultimately attain widespread attention. By the time their canonical single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released in 1991, Nirvana’s grungy rage had penetrated an industry recently characterized by staid, poppy ballads.

 

In this and many other instances of genre breakthrough, the driving influence of data analytics is hard to overlook; without machine-based accounting, Nirvana’s divergent sound would have never stood a chance against the shiftiness of Big Pop (I’m talking about record labels here, not, like, Coca-Cola or some genial grandpa with a nickname). Cold, hard evidence was exactly the wakeup call the industry needed to embrace the fact that audiences were not exclusively interested in pop. It was also the impetus behind the expansion of genre fanbases. Nirvana saw their work propagate from punk pop-ups to the airwaves of impressionable mainstream audiences eager to keep up with accelerant chart-climbers. A similar effect could be seen in country acts permeating coastal cities, and in hip hop migrating to landlocked suburbs.

 

Of course, at this point industry executives were having a fit. No money-hungry corporation is interested in preserving fairness—or real artistry, for the matter. It’s no surprise, then, that major record labels rebounded from this spurt of democracy in a more calculating fashion than ever before (literally, the difference was that they now relied on quantitative data to chart out their warpath rather than defer to past instincts of offering glamorous subtleties such as kitchen appliances in exchange for exaggerated music sales).

 

Tacticians came up with a long list of ways to manipulate record sales above the table, yet still below any reasonable standard of common courtesy. For example, it became common for labels to send a promising single straight to radio and delay commercial release until it gained significant airplay. Seems like a missed sales opportunity, right? Perhaps, but keep in mind that securing chart real estate was considered the precursor to momentous sales—prestige first, then profits. Labels would harangue radio stations to play their singles over and over to induce the benefits of repeated exposure (the more you hear something, the more of a chance you’ll like it) and gauge regional interest. This latter objective was important for the next step of the equation: deployment to record stores. If feedback indicated that a certain area was especially receptive toward a nascent hit, labels would concentrate their efforts on growing sales throughout that locale.

 

After a radio single was deemed fully baked into the American consciousness, labels were more than prepared to serve a piece of the piping-hot pie to as many record stores as possible. Oftentimes a single would be offered to record stores at a discount so it could be sold to eager fans at an irresistible price. This tactic optimized a song’s chance of reaching the top of the charts during its debut week—a feat impressive enough to mobilize indifferent consumers to invest in an evidently unmissable piece of culture, and thus preserve a single’s high standing. Radio stations followed suit by granting the hit even more airtime, with MTV trailing closely behind on the contingency that it was accompanied by an equally dominant (hell raising) video. Of course, this tactic only really favored the best of the best, i.e. singles coming from top artists in the top genres, backed by the top labels. Music from specialty genres such as reggae, New Age, and Latin, on the other hand, experienced profound neglect due to technological disparities; primarily sold by niche vendors who could not afford Soundscan equipment, they floundered beneath a lack of representative data.

 

In the grand scheme of things, it seems like peddling new music to consumers by way of discounts would be a win-win; an equilibrium of eagerness was sustained by deals that aligned with hit-seeking consumers and hit-hungry distributors alike. If history is any indicator, though, it’s clear that the music industry is averse to any sort of stasis. Keeping with the enduring theme of record labels pursuing a blatantly unnatural course of action in order to promote a blatantly unreasonable agenda, the musical landscape of the late 90’s soon saw a new type of “science” overtake the grounded marketing tactics of years’ past. I am, of course, referring to the Frankenstein-esque maneuvering that led to the likes of the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, and ‘N Sync.

 

In pursuit of the next big thing, labels conjured up their own uber-marketable-megastar-chart-toppers through auditions that seemed to target looks and personality over trivial factors such as…musical talent. Yes, the admonishments of poster-weary parents around the world may have been onto something—like the foods that populated the lunchboxes adorned with their faces, these musicians were saccharine and over-processed beyond (reasonable) palatability.

 

I’m pretty sure it was Sir Isaac Newton who proposed that a force of nature such as The Spice Girls may only be vanquished by an even more formidable, opposing influence. In accordance with this First Law of Motion, it’s clear that there was only one juggernaut large enough for this undertaking—the internet! (Wait…did you think I was gonna say Destiny’s Child or something?!) Digital music sharing was galvanized by the distribution of WinAmp (1997), a free software that enabled users to download and play MP3 files on their personal computers. WinAmp and other similar services helped resourceful fans circumvent restrictions imposed by record labels designed to protect albums from being broken up and shared as individual songs. Labels witnessed a waning autonomy over which songs could be accessed as singles vs. which resided within the bulk of an album.

 

Through the development of peer-to-peer networks (think of it like Spotify’s database, but commercial songs are illegally uploaded by users rather than artists), tech-zealous fans quickly constructed an extensive catalog of free music. The most consequential of these platforms was Napster, whose 1999 launch presaged the decline of physical media. Napster’s model was simple and attractive—with a little computer magic and human sweat, local MP3 files could be extracted from users’ computers and aggregated onto an open database…all for the low, low price of free.

 

This democratization of music distribution wriggled the industry’s airtight grip on listening patterns; consumers were no longer beholden to the confines of an LP, or even a preordained single for that matter. Rather, any song could now be accessed on its own, meaning there was really no need to buy a full album anymore. Between 1999 and 2003, yearly CD sales would drop by over 200 million. By this point over a quarter of American adults had shared music files online; college campuses were banning peer-to-peer sites to alleviate network congestion; labels and musicians were suing Napster left and right for copyright violations (most famously, perhaps, was Metallica’s 2000 lawsuit), and eventually fans as well.

 

This slew of legal drama helped nobody. Napster was portrayed as an irreverent hindrance to honest moneymaking; fans were shamed for their complicity; and the higher-ups came off as greedy and desperate. Much to everyone’s relief, Apple, in its recurring role as the fairy godmother of the early 2000’s, brokered peace with its introduction of iTunes in 2001. iTunes was considered win-win for record labels and fans alike—royalty-sharing agreements helped revive sales previously stunted by the emergence of free music. On the consumer end, listeners welcomed the restoration of a centralized musical outlet following the shutdown of a heavily litigated Napster that same year.

 

And of course, who could forget Billboard. Characteristically late to the party, Billboard added digital sales to its Hot 100 algorithm in 2005, and online streams in 2007. This overdue adjustment heralded a period that extends into present day: the age of online listening. Of course, there are many ways in which music consumption differs now vs. a decade-and-a-half ago. But in the grand scheme of things, any evolution taking place post-Napster pales in comparison to the analog-to-digital switch in the late 90’s. It was during this fundamental transition that albums were atomized into widely accessible singles, giving fans unprecedented autonomy in cherry-picking exactly what they wanted to listen to. This shift still defines the state of the industry today—I mean, what is Spotify, or Apple Music, or Tidal, or Bandcamp if not platforms that give us the ability to access individual songs (alongside specially curated playlists)?

 

Quantitative analysis of chart data supports this grouping of post-Napster years. Economists Andrea Ordanini and Joseph Nunes set out to determine whether the introduction of digital music facilitated greater homogeneity in the Hot 100 . Their answer is… complicated. First, let’s imaging the Hot 100 is composed of two sub-lists: the Top 10, and the losers (the Lukewarm 90, i.e. songs 11-100). These first ten spots are typically occupied by the crème de la crème of the industry—Brittneys and Whitneys, an assortment of Justins, people with dubious titles such as Lady and Dr., etc. And the next 90? Truly random.

 

Ordanini and Nunes argue that these two groups followed diverging yet consistent paths during a period that spans the birth of Napster in 1999 to the completion of their research in 2013. While the yearly number of unique songs and artists gracing the Top 10 decreased, the Lukewarm 90 saw the exact opposite. This outcome reflects how we wielded our newfound access to the largest musical archives in history: the slowed turnover in the Top 10 group speaks to diminishing cultural cohesion, with new stars and new hits emerging at a lowering frequency. While this data suggests that we are no longer actively chasing after the Next Big Thing, it also implies that those at the top stay at the top longer. Basically, as a culture we’ve decided to take a collective breather in our search for pop idols; we let the big names grow bigger out of habit, choosing only to coronate a newbie when their star power provides enough momentum for us to exert the bare minimum. We look to Miley Cyrus, Cardi B, and Lil Nas X as prime examples—whether through preexisting fame, a persistent fight for exposure, or a notorious app, we are most amenable to developing collective reverence for things that are brought to us. As a result, this hallowed cohort is able to work the charts to their advantage by leveraging their reliably large fanbases. Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga sustain their chart standings simply by continuing to be their behemoth selves and mobilizing a widespread army of fans. They stay at the top because we are comfortable holding them up.

 

The remaining 90 songs, however, seem to be collectively amorphous. The rapid influx and removal of songs from this group hints at the dissipation of a once monoculture; we are overwhelmed by the enormity of content at our disposal, jumping from new song to new song too quickly for anything to effectively stick. Of course, our inability to commit to the majority of these quick-hits is not purely a symptom of fast pacing, but also lackluster quality. A 2017 study lead by computational analyst Matthias Mauch identified a plateau in the functional diversity of Hot 100 songs propagating from the Napster days onward. Essentially, the songs that reach the Hot 100 can often be derivative of those at the very top in an attempt to replicate their success.

 

It may be puzzling to consider how this Lukewarm 90 came to fruition during the age of streaming. When we can listen to any of Spotify’s 70+ million songs, how do we all seem to encounter the same handful in passing? Record labels have essentially devised a series of methods to “hack” the charts through the infiltration of promoted content on apps. With Spotify this involves labels trying to land their artists on central playlists such as Today’s Top Hits, New Music Friday, “Essential [insert genre name here]”; releasing multiple versions of the same song in different styles (there are reggae iterations of Ed Sheeran songs out there in our evidently screwed universe); and producers avoiding slow buildups in order to prevent a song from being skipped. For the depraved, burgeoning TikTok, songs gain popularity through app executives compelling creators to develop and share accompanying dances (did I mention we’re screwed?). And this is where we went wrong. Charts are now meaningless avenues for greedy executives to exploit an algorithm in order to retain notoriety in the industry. They no longer reflect what we want to hear, but rather what the labels want us to hear. In this digital climate where we’re so easily influenced, the survival of charts means the sacrifice of artistry over strategy.

 

At the end of the day, we can only be manipulated so much before running out of patience. Sure, the agenda of record labels may make us stop and glance at the songs they’re trying to promote, but ultimately we no longer need to be told what to like—Spotify and other services now offer us personalized guidance via the generation of user-specific playlists. They facilitate exploration by appealing to our specific preferences rather than treating us as a collective target for backhanded manipulation. Thanks to streaming, we have finally reached a Nirvana in which chart-induced shiftiness no longer dominates what we listen to.