The precipitous drop in crossover between the R&B charts and the Hot 100 coincided with pop radio’s Gaga-era explosion, as well as Top 40’s fostering of its own set of rap stars who are virtually ignored by urban radio: Flo Rida, LMFAO, Pitbull, The Black Eyed Peas and now PSY. Meanwhile, many urban radio stars followed Rihanna’s lead, releasing different singles aimed at different radio formats. The latest albums by Usher, Nicki Minaj, and Chris Brown each have two separate singles campaigns for pop radio and urban radio. Usher’s midtempo, Rick Ross-assisted “Lemme See” was a big R&B radio hit than the uptempo dance track “Scream” was a pop radio hit, but under the new rules “Scream” would no doubt have appeared to be a bigger R&B hit. Distortions like that will be unavoidable now. And that will only exacerbate the culture wars already in progress, like earlier this year, when Nicki Minaj was invited by New York rap station Hot 97 to perform at their annual Summer Jam concert, and she decided to cancel after one of the station’s DJs insulted her pop crossover hit “Starships.” Under the old airplay-driven metrics, radio programmers and listeners got to decide what songs were of interest to their genre of choice. Now, Billboard decides what a song’s genre is. And often, their judgments seem more based on who is performing the song, or even that artist’s skin color, rather than the sound of the song or even what audiences are listening to it. In that sense, Billboard is giving itself more power to make decisions that bend the charts this way or that way, gerrymandering new genre boundaries. For instance, why is Train, who crossed over from rock radio to pop ages ago, now back on the rock chart under the new rules, but not nominal pop artist Bruno Mars, whose latest hit “Locked Out Of Heaven” prominently features live drums and electric guitar?
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“Its own set of rap stars” is such a good point/odd phenomenon that I think about a lot but never see discussed anywhere! Like who are Flo Rida’s fans? He must have some, right? Somewhere? He is too popular not to I think? I really hate Flo Rida.
