Leaving aside questions of her talent or her body, I’m confused as to how Britney Spears got so popular. For recording stars, isn’t airplay the # 1 most important thing? I listen to stations which play pop music, and I honestly can’t recall EVER hearing one of her songs. I’ll admit that my preferred stations (New York - WPLJ and WLTW, with some of WKJY from Long Island mixed in) have something of an adult demographic, but they still play plenty of teen-oriented stuff - Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, 98 Degrees, Avril Lavigne, Hanson when they were popular.
Why haven’t I been hearing Britney’s stuff? What stations does her music play on?
BTW, the same question applies to Christina Aguilera. “You Are Beautiful” is the first song of hers I ever heard on the radio, but her popularity was already high well before that.
Album sales are more important than airplay, I would think. THey could play you 24/7/365, but if you don’t sell any records, what’s the point? It’s not like she has a husband who can support her…
Well Lou Reed gets played on classic rock stations fairly regularly, and I doubt that he has had more then one platinum selling album in his recording career, so that kinda refutes your claim.
Back when her first album came out Britney was all over pop radio. Deal is these days radio has become so fragmented that she can end up getting played in 4 or 5 different formats. Also, she is a big player on the Dance Music charts ,which are based primarily on sales.
Also these days with so few singles being released, the Hot 100 is more heavily weighted towards airplay then sales.
TartPops, you utterly dodged Casey105’s point. Classic rock stations by definition only use music that is no longer on the popular music charts. The reasons for a classic rock station to play a particular song are widely varied, and include popular acclaim, critical acclaim, album sales “way back when”, a song’s cult status, or just a late-night request. “Mr. Roboto” by Styx enjoyed a resurgence in airplay on my local station after it was in that VW commercial, for example.
As far as pop goes, airplay is something that – more or less – the album’s promoters and producers buy from the radio stations, to theoretically guarantee album sales. Take a look at the albums in stores: the sticker that’s on them at the factory tells you what the hits are going to be. As long as it keeps selling albums, the producers will keep paying for airplay. Many of today’s manufactured pop hits are marketed as “the up-and-coming artist So-And-So!” The timing of this marketing has gotten bizarre, often occurring before the debut of their album (but clearly after their first hit single has been paid for), so that their “long-awaited debut album” can rocket up the charts, securing them a nomination for the ‘Artist With The Best Promoter’ Grammy.
When did that happen? Not arguing, really, just curious. I thought the charts changed formats oh, 10 or so years ago, to track album/singles sales and that’s why Garth Brooks, while popular among the country & western (yep…both kinds) fans, was knocking the likes of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston out of #1?
You’re talking about the introduction of Soundscan to the music/retail business.
Before Soundscan, there was no accurate way to tell precisely how many copies a particular album had sold. Record store owners were supposed to keep track and send in their numbers every week.
A good number of them were, shall we say, less then honest.
What Soundscan did was take the counting process out of the storw ownersw hands, thereby pretty much eliminating any chances of over or underreporting sales.
Now, whenever an album or single is scanned or punched into the register, it enters a database, which keeps track of what the album was and how many copies it sold.
I’m not quite sure about this next part but I think it goes something like this: Every week all the reports are electronically sent to Soundscan/Billboard where they are tallied up for the various album and music charts that Billboard publishes. The Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart is a chart which contains the 200 albums that have sold the most copies in a week, regardless of musical/spoken word genre or classiification.
There are also charts for Top Country, Rap, R&B and other genres.
It was quite interesting to see how badly country music had been underreported before Soundscan came along, as suddenly many country artists were not only appearing in the Top 10 in terms of album sales, but many were actually debuting in the #1 slot.
These days it’s not uncommon for an album to debut at #1, whereas before Soundscan I believe the only artists to do so were Elton John (twice), Bruce Springsteen and Whitney Houston.