There are many ways to approach writing about popular music, but the one that's the most concrete is what I'd call the "sports or athletics approach."
What I mean by that is that in sports there are winners and losers, and achievements are documented precisely. The best time in a relay race or a swim competition may be a world record. There may be intangibles in the play of a Michael Jordan, for instance, but the intangibles -- his artistry, you might say -- wouldn't matter if he hadn't won consistently.
So when it comes to pop music, the sports approach documents the top-grossing tour or the best-selling album but never deals with asthetics, which probably makes sense in a culture that rises and falls on the bottom line (mostly falling of late, but that's another topic).
Interestingly, this statistical approach to pop music achievement suffers from the same flaw as sports stats do: It's hard to compare statistics across different eras. When Babe Ruth hit his record numbers of home runs, the competition was different (black players were not in the major leagues, the pitcher's mound was a different height, etc.), the schedule was different (fewer games per season) and the potential substances used by players to cheat (saliva applied to baseballs as opposed to steroids applied to players) were different from what they were in Barry Bonds' day.
When Roger Maris failed to break Ruth's record of 60 homers in 154 games, which is the length of the season in Ruth's day, his record-setting 61st homer hit in the 162nd (and final) game of the 1961 season was given what's been called an "asterisk." In other words, Ruth's record still stood as the best ever hit in the old schedule side by side with Maris' record as the best ever hit in the new schedule.
The prevailing theory about why baseball commissioner Ford Frick decided to acknowledge the different schedules and thus preserve Ruth's record is that he biased in favor of Ruth and against Maris. Even so, it's easy to see that there's some justification for saying that a record set in one era, under a specific set of conditions, is different from a record set in another.
Possibly the best example of the sports approach to pop music writing is Chart Watch, a column ably and succinctly written by Paul Grein. (He has been doing this for a long time. He launched the Chart Beat column in Billboard magazine back in 1981, left that post in 1992 and has been doing
Chart Watch ever since, first, as a wire feature for newspapers and now on Yahoo's music site.) Grein always finds an angle that lets him tie together various aspects of his report on that week's top 10 best-selling albums.
In his Chart Watch for the week ending
May 3,2009, he talked about the age difference between 67-year-old Bob Dylan, who was at No. 1 with his "Together Through Life" album, and 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, who was at No. 2 with her soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie." From there, Grein launched into a quick history about how Dylan set and regained the distinction of being the oldest living recording artist ever to land a No. 1 album.
It's fun to read that Dylan set the record in September 2006 when his "Modern Times" album hit No. 1 and Dylan was 65; that he lost it when Neil Diamond, then 67, hit No. 1 with "Home Before Dark" in 2008; and that Dylan regained the record in May because he was older, almost 68, when "Together Through Life" was released. Before that, you had to go back to 1964 to even find an over-60 recording artist with a No. 1 album: Louis Armstrong, who was 62 when "Hello Dolly" hit the top of the chart.
But getting a No. 1 album in 1964 is definitely not the same as getting a No. 1 in 2009.
In 1964, the chart was compiled differently. Although people assumed it was a sales chart -- providing statistics that could not be argued -- the sales reports came not from a tally of actual sales but from a mix of sources that could distort the sales reporting. The dimensions of that distortion became apparent in 1991 when Billboard began basing its charts on sales statistics gathered by Nielsen Soundscan technology.
Using universal product codes (UPCs), Soundscan tracked sales right at the cash register, which seems a fairly reasonable way to do it.
Country and rap records, previously relegated to their own respective ghettos in the charts, suddenly took many positions in the Billboard 200 chart of best-selling albums. They also took many positions in the upper reaches of the chart, that is, the Top 20 and even the Top 10, where very few of these albums had gone before. This meant that either country and rap suddenly became very popular in the week between switching from the old reporting system to Soundscan, or that there was something very wrong in the old reporting.
Nobody has suggested that Soundscan is hugely flawed, and it seems unlikely. Its biggest and most obvious drawback would be that it could not track sales in stores that didn't use UPC technology or sales of records that didn't have a UPC, but by the time the system was instituted, this would have affected a very small number of stores and records.
Pop critics and observers had serious discussions about the whole issue at the time. Could it be that the sales of adult-oriented albums like "Hello Dolly" were overreported in 1964 and that the sales of rock 'n' roll albums were underreported in the year that The Beatles broke big in the United States? Did the sales dominance of Fleetwood Mac in late 1970s reflect reality or the reporting sources' dislike of disco?
I don't know whether anyone ever did a comparison of the Billboard album charts in the pre-Soundscan era to the sales certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to see whether they correlated or were widely divergent.
The RIAA awards Gold and Platinum records. These designations are based on sales, but the RIAA doesn't use Soundscan or Billboard's old methodology to count albums sold. The RIAA tracks sales based on units shipped minus returns, statistics the RIAA gets right from its members (record labels). Certainly, the RIAA is depending on the honesty of record labels(!), for heaven's sake, to make its awards, but they would be less likely to cook the books in favor of an album that label executives liked than the people sampled in Billboard's old formula, where reporting sources in the field clearly favored certain kinds of records.
When you're a label executive, sales are sales and you don't have to like the Spice Girls -- or Bob Dylan, for that matter -- to say that their albums are selling well for your label.
Soundscan is not the only difference in the business either. To hit No. 1, "Together Through Life" racked up sales of 125,000. Compare this with the 4 million in advance orders that propelled Garth Brooks' "Ropin' the Wind" to No. 1 in 1991. Music sales have gone through the floor in recent years, so being No. 1 ain't what it used to be when the Soundscan era began.
It's very likely that "Together Through Life" sold -- and is selling -- at about the pace that most of Bob Dylan's albums have sold throughout his nearly 50-year career. He has a loyal audience of longtime fans and a spate of younger ones added through the years. Longevity is one stat that can't be argued and, in many ways, that means more than being the oldest recording artist to have a No. 1 album -- especially since you can't truly compare stats across eras.
Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo
