Who do you think will be a major player at the Grammys next year? I say Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Bruno Mars, and Justin Timberlake have very good chances take alot of nominations.
When calculating HOT 100 positions for single from album that is released that week, does full sales are counted or sales affected by iTunes "complete my album" feature are reduced?
Hi Bill. Do you think Radio is currently too big of a factor on Hot 100?
Radio is highly manipulated by DJs, Clear Channel stations, behind the curtain deals etc, and does not always represent the public's genuine interest in songs which are overplayed there.
Examples: Maroon 5's One More Night, Love Somebody. Justin Timberlake's Take Back The Night, even Mirrors.
All huge radio hits with relatively poor sales, but the airplay alone is enough to carry them high on the Hot 100.
Are there any plans to lower down Radio influence to previous numbers of around 2010/2011. I think it was more fair back then.
Also (when you return), please explain the difference between a Clear Channel radio deal and payola, because some of the members on here use the term "payola" loosely.
This. And do you know which songs that were suspected of using payola?
This was before I had oversight of the charts. But the chart director at the time went into the week thinking we couldn't get accurate data from Walmart on an exclusive (the Eagles album) and then Walmart came to the table with verifiable data. The reality was - and this is from memory so I could be off a little - the Eagles sold roughly twice as many copies as Britney that week. The Eagles unquestionably had the top v selling album in the US that week and so the head of the charts dept made the call that the charts being accurate was the most important thing.
The rest, as they say, is history.
So nobody can truly explain this shady rule change. Do you have any idea how many copies Nielsen Soundscan weeded out for double-sales thanks to Virgin Megastores buying copies from Walmart and then selling them at their stores, too? And has Billboard ever thought about a rule about a time limit before enacting changes to their formulas? I remember similar meltdowns when YouTube views were counted earlier in the year, but a lot of people complained because it felt like the data change was made rapidly and rather unexpectedly, even though it was a great inclusion to the chart data in the end.
