Urban radio stations may have lost one of their last impetuses left not to play pop music with white-leaning audiences. On this week's r&b chart, with the changes enacted, Rihanna's decidedly pop (and, it should be noted, terrible) "Diamonds" jumps from #61 to #1, pushing Miguel's decidedly r&b (and brilliant) "Adorn" out of the top spot.
This has also led to the trend of black music stars like Nicki Minaj and Usher creating entirely different singles for different radio formats, with pop songs for white radio and r&b or rap songs for black radio.īillboard's new changes potentially strike an even bigger blow to black audiences being able to determine their own hits. Over the past year or so, there have been only a few songs popular on the r&b charts that cross over into the top 40 at any given time, usually below the top 10 (even this year's huge rap hits "The Motto" and "Mercy" got stuck in the teens on the big chart), while most of urban radio's big songs get stuck in the 30-100 range of the Hot 100. The introduction of Itunes data to the Billboard Hot 100 in 2005 has had the effect of slowly but surely pushing music favored by black audiences off the pop charts and top 40 (and even rhythmic) radio, to the point where there are now very few songs that cross over from urban radio to other formats. Further compounding the problem is that that isn't even true - economically privileged listeners, who are more likely to be white, are much more likely to purchase digital music. The radio listener chooses the station that best fits their tastes, whereas anyone might buy from Itunes. The problem with this is that there is no way of separating by demographics like there is for radio.
So today Billboard changed their policy to allow digital music sales to count on previously airplay-driven genre charts.
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