WIND BACK WEDNESDAY ASKS, CHART OR NOT, WHO ISN’T IN ON THE FIX?
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
In the past week I’ve been digging into music online that gives every indication of being at best machine-tooled but most likely wholly artificial, built to meet logarithmic patterns. It’s sleek, it’s really well constructed, it’s very easy to listen to and even easier to think it’s real.
And it comes in every form, every genre, well past the early days of this so-called AI music which focused on instrumental, “mood” tracks that might slip by on ambient-y playlists or tropical nightclub moods playlists etc.
As I said on radio last night when talking about this, sometimes the only way you can really tell that this is programmed rather than composed/performed isn’t the music but the stuff around it: absence of biographical material anywhere online or a history of any sort before this appearance; preponderance of singles; images that are just perfectly in-tune with the genre form (though sometimes not necessarily with the voice/sound you’re hearing); and that nagging feeling that this seems too close to exactly what you’d expect/want to hear.
And yes, I almost fell for a few and may well have fallen properly for others without knowing.
The point of it all is, of course, to scam, to milk money from people paying for streaming services and, especially, from living and breathing artists making music that isn’t getting played and therefore isn’t paying because the playlists and recommendations are full of this pap. And to do it all for relatively low costs with no further demands from pesky humans who might ask an accountant to check on royalties etc. Which is a time-honoured part of the music industry, of course.
All that caused a dig into the Wind Back Wednesday archives for a story that seems almost quaint now, of another attempt to line one pocket by filching from another. This time from 2010, with a name that at least had the grace not to pretend it wasn’t on the fix – which is something, I suppose – while the whole idea of the charts as something to note was already in steep decline.
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THE MUSIC INDUSTRY’S relatively calm response to a rather brazen attempt to "fix" the charts, certainly compared with some of the shock horror media reporting, says a lot about a fundamental change in the way music is bought, sold and measured. And how little understood it is.
Chartfixer, a hitherto unknown company which was little more than a website and a provocative promise before apparently shutting down midweek, offered a simple exchange. Pay from $6000 up and Chartfixer would in turn pay an army of downloaders to buy your single online, their sales pushing your song into the top 100 pop chart. If your pockets are deep enough, pay $30,000 and your song could make the top 20 most weeks with sales of 5000 copies.
Let’s set aside the two questions of morality here: that someone would buy a song they don’t necessarily like or want just to get it into the charts; and that the $3 payment Chartfixer offered to downloaders, who pay around $1.75 per purchase, left the company pocketing more than $15,000, in the example of the 5000 downloads for $30,000.
Let’s look instead at why you would bother to fix the charts. According to the spokesman for Chartfixer, identified only as Mr Chartfixer in written responses, "The aim [of Chartfixer] is to help a musician get their song some radio airplay for one week and then let the music-buying public decide whether the song should sink or swim." The theory being that if your song is in the charts then radio will play it and more people will buy it and you’ll go higher in the charts and fame will follow.
Now there’s a long if not honourable tradition in the music industry of paying for play (the payola which saw DJs or programmers earn a cut for getting a song heard on radio) and paying for position (payments, in cash and kind, offered to retailers who would report extra “sales” to the chart compilers). Locally, one major record company was anecdotally known in the 1980s as the white goods company due to its propensity for handing over fridges and the like to store owners who filled out the forms the “right” way.
We don’t know that payola to radio personnel doesn’t continue but we do know that the influence of individual DJs and stations is almost negligible now that programming is done across national networks based on pseudo-scientific research.
But since the local music industry switched to direct online reporting of sales in the mid-1990s, with point-of-sale data sent to the compiler, the Australian Record Industry Association, it’s much harder to sneak dodgy sales past. Unorthodox or unexplained spikes in sales, even from online retailers, earn queries from the chart compilers and run the risk of being excluded from overall sales figures.
More importantly however, say a number of artist managers and radio programmers, the charts don’t really matter that much. Not for record buyers who, unlike the days of Countdown or Kasey Casem’s Top 40 countdown, don’t have a broadly popular central chart reference. And not for radio.
As one prominent manager put it: “Sales charts tell you that, say, less than1% of the people who heard this song on air liked it so much they went out and bought it. Radio is more interested in finding a tune that more than 90% of listeners in certain demographics find sufficiently inoffensive that it doesn't make them change stations.
“Sometimes that song will also attract buyers but not always - they are two different things.”
It’s a view backed up by Toni Pipicelli, music director for the Nova network who said that “at the end of the day the song needs to be right for our listeners, so even chart success doesn’t mean guaranteed airplay”.
“Charts are a small part of what we look at when adding music to Nova: listener feedback, research, song exposure in all forms of media and buzz are factors we take into consideration,” Pipicelli said. “The internet has made music from all over the world so easily accessible that our listeners are jumping on songs way before it charts and in most cases I don’t think they look at a song that way.”
Creating that buzz still matters, for as John Woodruff who made his fortune managing Savage Garden, liked to say, “management is the art of creating the perception of success”. But maybe these days that perception doesn’t come principally from the charts or even radio, but Twitter, chat rooms and blogs.
“If you had that kind of money to throw around on something a bit dubious, frankly, I think you'd be better off mobilizing a few dozen kids to chatter endlessly about the artist in the right places online [than fixing the charts],” said a manager of an internationally successful Australian band.
“It's an equally artificial way of creating the perception of success but if done well it would be more likely to resonate with today's younger audience than a number on a sales chart.”
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