Billboard Remains Music Biz Bible
Billboard
Music fans clamoring to learn that Don Was is about to take an unknown under his wing and turn her into Bonnie Raitt read Billboard. So does the fan who can tell the difference between pop, adult contemporary, and more importantly, just what a Heatseeker is. This is the same fan who knows Dianne Warren's songs, Waddy Wachtel's guitars and Clive Davis' signings.
If you are one of those people, you are already reading Billboard or are familiar with it. If you are not one of those people, there is no way you are paying $7 an issue or the bargain $300 each year. For the former, there is no way they skip reading Billboard. Casual fans, especially older fans, will remember going to the "record store" and looking at a single page of the Hot 100 torn from that week's magazine hanging above the 45s.
I Want To Grow Up To Be Fred Bronson or Joel Whitburn
Chart wizards Bronson and Whitburn have compiled numerous books of Billboard's famous charts sliced and diced every way imaginable. Mariah Carey ties Elvis for the number of #1 records in the Hot 100? Bronson is the expert who knows those counts like most people know their children's names He and Whitburn can tell you why a duo like Hall & Oates can be considered more successful than the more influential Simon & Garfunkel or how to rank the various chart positions for every artist to determine the ones with the most success.
Before everything from radio to television to publishing became niches, a Billboard chart position was easy. There might be a country, Hot 100 or R&B placement, but ultimately, success was a question of the singles and or album charts. You could also see what songs were doing well in other countries and see what influential radio stations were adding to their playlists.
The melange resulted in a homogenous music scene that blended musical boundaries and could report on news ranging from Sly and the Family Stone to Sly Stallone's brother, Frank. Readers could even see top grossing concerts and try imagining how much money it cost to put on a show for 25,000 to figure out what Prince's cut of hundreds of thousands of dollars actually was.
Ads, Advertisements and Those Pages That Tell You To Buy Things
Reading the advertising is as much a part of each Billboard issue as the news blurbs, charts and statistics dotting each magazine. The full page, slick ads are colorful, entertaining and often contain as much news as the accompanying pages. They contain concert photos, tombstones (notices of mergers and acquisitions) and especially artist and album photos. Following who pops the megabucks for a full page money in honor of an artist or A&R person can be just as informative as the news pieces themselves.
Number One With A Bullet
Ever wonder where that expression comes from? The Billboard charts gave us that fun expression, the bullet denoting a release moving quickly up the charts. Since those early days, Billboard has color coded its charts, added margin notes and, most importantly, switched to actual sales.
Pursuing the copy by listening chair, just the Hot 100 yields an amazing number of data points and questions:
-- Newcomers Zac Efron and Vanessa Anne Hudgens riding Disney's High School Musical to two songs on the charts, including Breaking Free, which broke free from #86 to #4. Time to pay attention to it.
-- Natasha Beddingfield's Unwritten just crossed one million in sales while Kelly Clarkson's Because of You has sold two million copies.
-- Meanwhile, Gwen Stefani has just charted a song at #95. Is that really a single release or just something that is getting picked up as an album cut?
That's just from the infamous Hot 100. Many more stories await in the new digital and ringtones charts, the Country charts, the Hip-Hop charts and the many pieces of data available every week. And if you're reading this years from now, the early part of 2006 was when a band named for a Jethro Tull song, Auqalung, was leading the Heatseekers chart with their Strange and Beautiful album. Who knows what the future holds for them, but they just might be worth a listen, and you would have learned about it in this issue of Billboard.
The Bottom Line, Subscription Cards and All
1. This is the music industry bible. Everyone in the industry reads it cover to cover.
2. Expensive at $7 an issue, you can buy an annual subscription for $300. That's a lot of scratch if you are not serious about your music.
3. Sometimes the ads are the best part of Billboard
4. Everything about any chart anywhere that matters originates in this magazine.
5. Leaving reviews and gossip to Spin and Rolling Stone, this is about the business of music.
