Billboard has been around for 125 years. It started in 1894. It was focused on outdoor advertisement. That’s where the word “billboard” comes from. It moved to live entertainment, mostly carnivals and circuses. When music and vaudeville started, it began to produce sheet music. You started seeing some charts in the magazine based on the top-selling sheet music in big-city stores.
This went on until our first national chart in 1940 and continued from there. What’s kept us around so long? Any industry needs an independent voice to help spread the word, and Billboard’s been there from the inception of music. We have been tracking it and acting as an independent voice to lend legitimacy. Originally, charts were based on store-based sales. Somebody at the store would tell you what the top sellers were.
Somebody at the radio station would say, “Here are my 40 biggest songs in rank order.” There was a formula behind where they ranked, how big the store was and how big the radio station was. It was a weighted system, so a radio station in New York would be more of a voice than a station in Detroit, for example. It was the same way for retail- the bigger the store, the more weight they had. So it was really a reporting-based model with an honor system.
As with any honor system, it’s not always so honorable. Generally, it was a system that worked, because at the time there were checks and balances. It wasn’t that easy to smell out a fake, and that’s what people did. That’s why they had a position they had. In 1991, we moved to electronic monitoring of radio stations and over-the-counter sales. So when you bought a CD, they would scan it. That UPC number would click, and we would know for the first time ever exactly how many units of an album were sold in a week.
In the past, it was really speculation and the gold and platinum certifications that were accumulated over time. So that was a big change in the early ’90s, and the industry was a bit taken aback at what reality showed. What it did show was that Country was a pretty big genre, and Hip Hop was a pretty big genre. Where those titles might have struggled in the past, now we knew. All of a sudden, we had NWA albums debuting at number one and Garth Brooks albums debuting at number one.
It was a whole new world for everyone, and it made the charts much better. Over time, it’s continued to evolve in the digital landscape to where we are today, with streaming being the main mode of music consumption. Being that independent voice, lending legitimacy as to what is happening, over the past 25 years, we’ve aligned ourselves with great data partners whom we trust. This includes Nielsen music, which has tracked our sales and radio and streaming data since 1991.
We work with the industry to make sure we have the right data sets coming in. If there’s a big streaming service out there, we want them in. Thankfully, as these services started to rise, which also goes back to retail stores and radio stations, they want to be part of what we do. It adds legitimacy to their business. They know that if they’re part of the Billboard charts, then they have some cachet with the labels and the artists and managers as well.
Their business is going to be reflected in what we do. So we have a great system working, and we work hard to cultivate those relationships and to make sure that everyone feels like they’re a part of what we do. Just continuing to evolve the charts. We moved from a pure album sales chart to one that incorporates streaming in 2014, and it was pretty much the right time to do it.
It was right on the cusp of where sales were really starting to decrease and streaming services were really starting to increase their usage and their pay subscribers. Billboard is quite thankful that people still look at our charts as the standard in the industry. Record labels, artists, and managers work very hard in mining the right avenues to create noise, to do well on those charts. We hear about it every week. We’re involved from the production to promotion level, as people try to understand how the charts work, and what they can do to fare better on the lists on a week-to-week basis.
We hear from artists and management all the time, when their artists get to number one, about how happy they are, and how it means the world to them. Billboard has been around for 125 years, and the fact that we’re still standing here today. We mean so much to so many people, which is really something that we take great pride in. We’re not resting on our laurels, we’re continuing to innovate what we do. I can tell you, in the past 10 years, what we’ve done in terms of data and chart measurement has just been incredible.
That’s just due to how music consumption has changed over that time. For decades it was pretty simple. You bought a song, you bought an album, or you listened to it on the radio. Those are your only options. So it’s a pretty simple thing to do. How you bought it might have changed, and we adapted how we did that, but it was a pretty standard set of data.
Now, with streaming and social and how things continue to evolve, we’re constantly trying to evolve with the times and adjust the methodology to how people are getting their music today. We just try to be where the music consumer is, and we’ve done a really good job over the past 80 years in doing that. So we want to continue to evolve and continue to grow with the music industry, and more importantly, with the music consumer. Billboard is a big name in the history books so remember our contributions as you continue your music education.
