Author | Wan Yi Edit | Fan Zhihui
"It's time to go back to the days when condoms and lollipops were also album sales."
Reddit user sundayontheluna left such comments when he saw Billboard's new rules.
But ta isn't the only one linking Billboard's new rules and condoms. On Twitter, a large number of netizens left similar comments, such as "The first thing I saw when I got up was that Billboard had reverted to the condom buying rule." Another example, "Billboard is a scam, how can fans buy albums as a scam, but bundling condoms is encouraged, is not a scam?" ”
Recently, Billboard announced changes to the rules, planning that starting June 30 this year, the Billboard 200 will include "fan pack" sales in the album charts. The so-called "fan pack" refers to some fixed combination of album sales plus peripheral sales. But after a huge controversy inside and outside the industry, Billboard announced on July 13, 2020 that it would no longer use bundling as the basis for all its charts.
So, one stone stirred up a thousand waves.
As one of the most important lists, Billboard 200 on the list and even the top means higher exposure and business resources, which has always been a must for artists and fans. And why did "bundling", one of the most controversial rules of recent years, return less than three years after it was outlawed?
Will the farce of "bundling" be repeated?
"Bundling" is nothing new.
Until 2020, Billboard counted this bundle as one of the bases for the Billboard 200 album chart. With the rise of streaming and the decline in album sales, bundle sales surged.
In August 2018, sales of Spicy Chicken Nicki Minaj's album Queen were surpassed by rapper Travis Scott's Astroworld. Nicki Minaj complained on social media that Travis Scott became the champion by selling his tour tickets as a bundle album. In September of that year, on "The Ellen Show," Nicki Minaj revived the incident, "When your album sales are lost to someone who sells T-shirts and merchandise, and also sells his own unannounced tour tickets, you feel tricked." ”
The controversy was pushed to a high point by the complains of topic queen Micki Minaj, but the bundling boom went even further.
Around 2019, all kinds of artists have taken bundling sales to the extreme, full of creativity, forming a "peripheral" frenzy. Not only are a large number of record companies releasing a large number of vinyl records and CDs on Thursday afternoons (the last day of the week that charts track the situation to boost sales), but there are also artists who rely on various creative peripherals to climb the charts.
For example, in May 2019, Miley Cyrus bundled her digital EP with a condom with the EP's name for $20 while promoting the EP "She is Coming."
In July 2019, Post Malone offered a $75 pool float for the new album "Goodbyes", bundled its own digital album for sale.
Rapper Tyler, The Creator added T-shirts, pins, stickers, digital albums and a courtyard sign that said "Vote to Igor" to the $40 fan bag. DJ Khaeld, who competed for first place at the same time, launched about 50 different fan packs on his personal website, bundling albums with T-shirts, coloring books, surf shorts and more.
According to Billboard's statement, nearly all of the artists who topped the Billboard 200 in 2019 benefited from the boost from the bundle.
For example, Celine Dion doesn't offer bundles, but fans can claim a copy of her new album by purchasing tickets to her tour. Prior to the release of the album in January 2020, both Selena Gomez and Kesha doubled the number of fan packs on their online stores.
Although bundling has become a common practice in the industry, it has also caused a lot of controversy.
Opponents argue that bundling distorts the charts so that they reflect more the overall number of fans than the actual popularity of the album or the level of music consumption. Moreover, bundling can sometimes make it difficult to tell whether fans are really willing to buy an album.
Later, Billboard required that bundled items must be sold as single items, and the price of peripheral items should be lower than the price of the bundle.
However, as long as the bundling is still there, there will be reasonable use of the rules, and it will cause controversy.
In May 2020, country veteran Kenny Chesney announced that he would be postponing his tour to Chillaxification until 2021 due to the pandemic, which was one of many that had been postponed during the pandemic. But the news has angered many music consumers, mostly fans of hip-hop superstar Drake. Kenny Chesney's ninth album, Here and Now, surpassed Drake's new album, Dark Lane Demo Tapes, to top the Billboard 200, in large part because of Chesney's bundle.
According to Forbes, the "Here and Now" album sold 233,000 sales units, of which 222,000 were physical album sales, and only 10,000 sales units came from streaming, or 13.4 million on-demand volumes. Of the 223,000 sales units of "Dark Lane Demo Tapes", the digital album sales units exceeded 201,000, or 269.1 million on-demand views.
As you can see, Drake's album has no tickets or peripheral bundle sales, or even physical album sales.
But that doesn't change anything. Kenny Chesney's record label Warner Music executive Ben Kline told The New York Times that because fans were aware of the CD bundle ticket sales, they didn't violate the law. Moreover, Drake is not a Buddhist player, in order to promote the single "Toosie Slide", before the release of the single, the Drake team invited TikTok influencers to create momentum for the single, and "Scorpion" also caused some Spotify subscribers to ask for a refund of the membership fee due to too many advertisements on Spotify.
Proponents argue that bundling allows the list to reflect the overall strength of the artist and is good for serving superfans. And, because bundling is often accompanied by large touring events or brand marketing planning, this gives more vitality to the environment and gives different types of singers the opportunity to be on the Billboard 200.
Industry controversy persisted, and eventually Billboard announced in July 2020 that it would no longer include bundling on the list.
But unexpectedly, less than three years later, bundling returned again.
However, in order to avoid the recurrence of those previous controversies, Billboard also introduced bundles with more detailed restrictions. "Each released album can only have two fan packs - such as a T-shirt + one (single) single/CD, and the single item in each fan pack must be sold separately on the same website; The fan pack will only include merchandise, and there will be no tickets, meetups, virtual goods, or benefits; The fan pack must contain a physical album: digital downloads and peripheral combinations will not be counted on the list. Also, the combination of fan packs must be approved by Luminate and Billboard before the launch date."
Why is it always scolded to change the rules, but it is still necessary?
Every time Billboard changes its list rules, it is considered to be targeting someone, and this time is no exception.
Some netizens threw out a series of questions, such as "Why can the surrounding area be counted?" Why June? Who is going to post songs in June? There must be a problem...", "Who is the singer who is going to release songs in the second half of the year and have a tour at the same time? ”
There are also fans who suspect that their idols have been targeted: "I hope that BTS will have a bundle next time, so that Billboard will remove the bundle rules again, because when they see BTS at the top, they always think about changing the rules", "They just created a rule to deliberately prevent Taylor Swift from being on the list, and they knew it wouldn't work, so they decided to make a special exception when Taylor was on tour." ”
However, if you look back at the major rule changes of the past decade at Billboard, in addition to various revised restrictions to maintain the integrity of the charts, they are all related to major changes in the music industry.
For example, starting in 2020, that is, after YouTube launched YouTube Music, Billboard included YouTube's official video views in the Billboard 200 list, giving YouTube the same weight as other platforms such as Apple and Spotify. Last year, Billboard also announced a limit on the number of active singles and albums a single consumer can buy from four to one per week, and buy more than two in bulk to prevent fans from buying digital albums to brush sales.
Of course, these rule revisions have invariably met with a great deal of skepticism and controversy.
For example, the restriction of digital album sales is considered by BTS fans to be aimed at them. Some fans believe that the reason why BTS has not been able to make a breakthrough on the Billboard 100 before is that the list has a relatively large proportion of the consideration of the broadcast rate of American radio broadcasts, which is difficult for foreign artists to break through.
In addition, the number of Army (BTS fans) is not too large, and it is difficult to brush the number of plays, so Army can only hit the charts by spending money on singles. From the chart released by Army itself, you can see how BTS album sales are far ahead. After changing the rules, it is bound to make it more difficult for singers in the idol genre to top the Billboard 200.
But according to Billboard, the return of bundling is actually the result of the music industry's much-anticipated results.
In the fall of 2022, Luminate and Billboard held a one-day meeting with record labels to discuss topics related to charts and data. According to a record company executive who was present, "Everyone, both mainstream and independent, is saying, please let's sell fan packs again." ”
Some music company executives believe that merchandising is a good measure of an artist's or album's popularity, which is good for superfans to show their worth. These fans may have spent $10 a month on music subscriptions, but not enough, they also have to collect merchandise, just as people used to collect vintage CDs or vinyl records, which has prompted record companies to get creative in sales.
"For fans, wearing what your idol creates is still irresistible. It sounds creepy," says cultural critic Ineye Komonibo, "but when you fall in love with an artist, you want to own a part of them — so you can connect somehow." ”
It will also be a shot in the arm for the music industry. Within record labels, the decision-making process about "bundling" sometimes turns into a tug-of-war between marketing executives and treasurers.
If the price of the bundle sale is reasonable, this kind of fan pack is naturally profitable, and the record company may also be able to take a cut from the merchandising sales. But sometimes record companies will also strive to pursue the ranking on the charts in order to increase the exposure and commercial value of artists, even at the expense of making money.
For example, Lady Gaga's 2011 album Born This Way sold for 99 cents on Amazon. In its first week of release, Lady Gaga eventually sold more than 1 million albums, but nearly half of that (about 440,000) came from Amazon's big sale. This also led directly to Billboard's change to the rule that albums priced below $3.49 were not counted.
There is no doubt that the return of bundling will once again stimulate the spending of superfans and the growth of physical consumption in the music industry. Coupled with the specific restrictions on "bundling", I believe that the controversy over "bundling" will be less.
epilogue
But in any case, overly obsessed with the list is unnecessary.
In the eyes of SoundCloud executive David Turner, "the Billboard chart itself is not meant to reflect the most popular music, but the most profitable music." "Otherwise, Billboard wouldn't have prioritized free and subscription playback, and wouldn't have allowed bundling."
In the era of increasingly differentiated musical tastes, although a comprehensive list is still a huge recognition of artists, artists and fans should see clearly that a list cannot fully represent their own musical achievements, and sometimes brushing the top of the list that cannot be recognized will only damage the image of artists and charts.
As Game of Thrones puts it, "Anyone who emphasizes that he is king is not a true king." ”（Any man who must say, "I am the king" is no true king.）
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