The Newest Way to Game the Billboard Charts Is Super Annoying

Wren Graves
·4 min read

The post The Newest Way to Game the Billboard Charts Is Super Annoying appeared first on Consequence.

Editor’s note: Wren Graves writes about trends in the entertainment industry and publishes a pop-culture crossword puzzle every Tuesday in the Consequence Newsletter. This week, his analysis of the Billboard charts is also being spotlighted on our site. Subscribe here to never miss an issue of the newsletter, and check out this week’s crossword, “Waynes’ World,” here. 

For almost as long as Billboard has published charts, artists and their reps have tried to game them. You may have noticed this latest Annoying Tactic, or perhaps you caught Annoying Tactic (Acoustic), Annoying Tactic (Sped Up), Annoying Tactic (Slowed Down), and dozens of Annoying Tactic (Alternate Mixes). Artists are releasing the same song in alternate versions, in what is a rational (but still tiresome) reaction to Billboard’s rules.

How did we get here? Figuring out what’s popular sounds simple enough, but the people doing the counting have to make all sorts of judgment calls. Is watching a music video the same as paying money to download a song? Do ad-tier streams matter as much as paying customers? And should different versions of the same track be tallied as different songs?

In the case of the Billboard charts, the answer to all of these questions is “no,”  and each “no” ensures that more expensive consumption is given a bigger share of the vote.

According to the New York Times, the Billboard album charts count a YouTube stream the same as a stream on Spotify or any other platform — depending on whether the listener paid for their account. 3,750 streams from free users are counted the same as 1,250 plays from paid accounts, which is equal to one physical album purchase.

Of course, packaging multiple versions as a single goes back to the 1980s, but the digital structure — and pressure to buy each version separately — are new.As my colleague Jonah Krueger recently looked at with the iTunes chart, charts encourage both diehard stans and anyone with an axe to grind to buy the same song multiple times. The more important it is to fans, the more they can pay, both to the artists and middlemen.

If you’re a well-adjusted adult, you’re probably saying, “so what?” because well-adjusted adults don’t care about the Billboard charts. Apart from the artists themselves, other industry professionals, and freaks like me, Billboard’s rules are mostly impacting those on the imaginary end of a parasocial relationship — the kind of super fans who stream albums while they’re sleeping and whine to their parents for their credit cards. As a dad myself I feel for those parents. We already have to fight advertisers, social media algorithms, and video game lobbies for influence over our kids; do we really have to compete against beautiful teenagers and their dimples, too?

But nobody’s being forced into making dumb purchases. The main reason I’ve been watching this trend is because the Game of Charts makes the business part of the music industry more irksome. This last became an issue in the bundle craze of 2019 and 2020, when half of the albums going No. 1 reached the top with the help of digital downloads bundled with merchandise, tickets, meet-and-greets, and more. Many people “buying” albums had no idea they got an album with their purchase.

After public outcry and industry backlash, Billboard finally changed those rules in 2020, though limited merch bundles made a comeback as “Fan Packs” in 2023, because you can’t keep a good profit margin down. And artists have gotten even more, uh, creative. Also in 2020, Justin Bieber posted and deleted instructions for fans outside the US to use VPNs to cheat “Yummy” to No. 1.

That tactic didn’t catch on, presumably to the relief of the FCC, but Bieber has also participated in this latest trend, appearing on multiple versions of SZA‘s “Snooze (Acoustic).”  SZA has happily hopped on the wave, releasing five versions of new single “Saturn,” including live, sped up, acapella, and instrumental, which preempt the most popular remixes on TikTok. Ariana Grande took it a step farther, dropping at least 14 different versions of “yes, and?,” and Lil Nas X, who pioneered the infinite remix strategy to keep “Old Town Road” at No. 1, unveiled four mixes of “Where Do We Go Now?”

Again: so what? A few superfans purchased 14 copies of Grande’s “yes, and?,” and while some of them were probably adults, the rest of their parents have our sympathy. It’s annoying for critics, granted, though our numbers are only shrinking. But you know who might get tired of this really, really quickly? The artists and labels.

Right now, commercial singles with No. 1 ambitions are five-times the work they were a year ago. Add in extra mixing, mastering, and producing fees, and it’s easy to imagine how this strategy (Attack of the Clones?) could get wildly expensive. Again, if you’re normal: Who cares? But for those of us crossing our fingers this trend dies, we can only hope the money being harvested from stans is less than the cost to harvest them. Because the rules of the Billboard charts work like a reverse Robin Hood, robbing from the stans to give the rich more. And the only way the rules will change is if the rich themselves push for it.

The Newest Way to Game the Billboard Charts Is Super Annoying
Wren Graves

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