Climbing the Charts (ebook)

Argumento de Climbing the Charts (ebook)

Despite the growth of digital media, traditional FM radio airplay still remains the essential way for musicians to achieve commercial success. Climbing the Charts examines how songs rise, or fail to rise, up the radio airplay charts. Looking at the relationships between record labels, tastemakers, and the public, Gabriel Rossman develops a clear picture of the roles of key players and the gatekeeping mechanisms in the commercial music industry. Along the way, he explores its massive inequalities, debunks many popular misconceptions about radio stations' abilities to dictate hits, and shows how a song diffuses throughout the nation to become a massive success.

Contrary to the common belief that Clear Channel sees every sparrow that falls, Rossman demonstrates that corporate radio chains neither micromanage the routine decision of when to start playing a new single nor make top-down decisions to blacklist such politically inconvenient artists as the Dixie Chicks. Neither do stations imitate either ordinary peers or the so-called kingmaker radio stations who are wrongly believed to be able to make or break a single. Instead, Rossman shows that hits spread rapidly across radio because they clearly conform to an identifiable style or genre. Radio stations respond to these songs, and major labels put their money behind them through extensive marketing and promotion efforts, including the illegal yet time-honored practice of payoffs known within the industry as payola.

Climbing the Charts provides a fresh take on the music industry and a model for understanding the diffusion of innovation.

"There is a lot to recommend about this book. Rossman excels at balancing methodological details to satisfy the academic reader and intuitive explanations of techniques and results for the nonacademic reader. The book also takes on theories from various areas, and the author does not play favorites. It's clear he has a genuine interest in identifying the true mechanisms, which he distills in his writing."--Brandy Aven, ASA Economic Sociology Newsletter

"Gabriel Rossman is the leading researcher in the sociology and economics of the music industry, and this book shows him at the top of his research and exposition powers."--Tyler Cowen, author of An Economist Gets Lunch

"Climbing the Charts gives an eye-opening view of the front and back of radio broadcasting. It shows that the music industry has even more influence on radio airplay than we might imagine, but broadcasters and listeners also matter. Surprisingly, the greatest role of broadcasters is in their choice of radio formats, which structure the market for the music industry and the listeners. The important topic, careful analysis, and clear writing make this book broadly appealing."--Henrich Greve, INSEAD

"We have a lot of books on how innovation happens, but too few on how successful innovations propagate. Climbing the Charts offers remarkable insight into just how complicated that process can be. This clear and succinct book challenges our easy understanding of the way these markets work, and ultimately enriches our mental model of what it means to bring something new into the world."--Megan McArdle, senior editor, Atlantic

" Climbing the Charts dispels many myths, both popular and academic, about how songs and other inventions reach widespread appeal. Rossman skillfully uses diffusion of innovations theory and original data to tell the story of how popular culture is produced. In so doing, he helps us all appreciate the importance of understanding how change occurs."--Thomas W. Valente, University of Southern California

"Pop radio has been written about in hundreds of books, mainly by musicologists or radio/music executives in their memoirs. Climbing the Charts adds a much-needed social scientific perspective on how the industry operates. Effectively disputing many pieces of conventional wisdom about the business, this fascinating and important book makes a substantial contribution to the work on innovation and diffusion, and the production of culture."--Jennifer C. Lena, author of Banding Together

"Rossman's book is an outstanding example of a new, hybrid genre. It draws promiscuously on a range of methods to build a rich empirical understanding of a particular cultural object and industry. . . . If this book is radio's swan song, it's a good one."--Jacob G. Foster, American Journal of Sociology

"Climbing the Charts represents an important contribution to the sociological study of diffusion and music. In the end, we know much more about how innovations diffuse and Rossman updates our understanding of gatekeeping in the music industry."--Alexandre Frenette, Sociologica

"Gabriel Rossman not only breathes life into the perhaps stale world of Top 40 but also offers messages of importance for diffusion research. Students of the mass media and industry dynamics, as well as those interested in diffusion models and mechanisms, will find much food for thought in Climbing the Charts."--David Strang, Administrative Science Quarterly0List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction 1
1.1 The Diffusion of Innovation 2
1.2 The Production of Culture 6
1.3 Organization of the Book 8

2 How Songs Spread 11
2.1 Record Release Dates 12
2.2 Corporate Radio 15

3 Buying Your Way onto the Chart 22
3.1 A History of Payola Scandals 24
3.1.1 The 1950s Scandal and the Rise of Rock and Roll 25
3.1.2 The 1973 Drugola Scandal 27
3.1.3 The Gambino Family and "The Network" in the 1980s 28
3.1.4 Corporate Radio, Professionalized Payola, and the 2005 Spitzer Investigation 30
3.2 Suppressing Payola 35
3.2.1 The Robust Logic of Payola 39

4 Can Radio Stations Break Singles? 44
4.1 The Role of "Opinion Leaders" in Diffusion 45
4.2 The Distribution of Connection in Radio 48
4.3 Diffusion of Pop Songs and Radio Stations 51
4.4 The Role of Influentials for Endogenous Diffusion 53
5 The Dixie Chicks Radio Boycott 59
5.1 Corporate Censorship 60
5.2 Social Movements 63
5.3 Genre 67

6 But Which Chart Do You Climb? 71
6.1 Trends in the Differentiation of Radio Formats 72
6.2 Classification and Art 75
6.3 Crossover 77
6.4 New Genres and Formats 80
6.4.1 Reggaetón Comes to the Mainland 81
6.4.2 The Development of the "Hurban" Format as an Artistic and Market Niche 83

7 The Future of the Chart 91
7.1 General Lessons of the Book for Diffusion of Innovations 95
7.1.1 Particular Lessons for Diffusion in Pop Music Radio 98
7.2 Centralization and Distribution of Decision-making 100
7.3 The Struggle to Control Publicity 108
7.4 Structures of Salient Information 112
7.5 Genre 116
7.6 The Emerging Structure of Popular Culture Industries in the
Twenty-first Century 119

Appendix A Datasets 123
Appendix B Robustness to Assumptions about Volume of Airplay
Constituting an "Add" 127
Notes 133
Bibliography 155
Index 167
FIGURES
1.1 The Two Ideal Diffusion Curves 3
1.2 The Hirsch Gatekeeping Model 6
2.1 Diffusion Curve for "Umbrella" by Rihanna on Top 40 Stations 12
2.2 Diffusion Curves for Singles on the Rihanna Album Good Girl Gone Bad on Top 40 Stations 13
2.3 Hazards for Singles on the Rihanna Album Good Girl Gone Bad on Top 40 Stations 14
2.4 Illustration of the Corporate "Single Playlist" Hypothesis 17
2.5 Diffusion Curves for "Umbrella" by Rihanna for Top 40 Stations Owned by Various Chains 18
2.6 Distribution of Song Adoption Time Clustering by Corporate Owner 20
3.1 Stories on "Payola" and "Radio" in the New York Times 25
3.2 Exogenous Diffusion Coefficient by Quarter 37
4.1 Distribution of Nominations for Top 40 Stations 49
4.2 Social Network of Top 40 Stations 50
4.3 Typical Adoption Time as a Function of Nominations for Top 40 Stations 52
4.4 Diffusion Curves for Singles on the Black Eyed Peas Album Monkey Business on Top 40 Stations 54
4.5 Top 40 Stations in Social Network Space with Filled
Dots for Those Having Played "My Humps" 57
5.1 Daily Spins of Dixie Chicks Songs on Country Stations 60
5.2 Daily Spins of Dixie Chicks Songs on Country Stations by Chain 62
5.3 Daily Spins of Dixie Chicks Songs on Country Stations by 2000 Presidential Vote 66
5.4 Daily Spins of Dixie Chicks Songs by Station Format 69
6.1 Diffusion Curve for "Love Song" by Sara Bareilles in AAA, Hot AC, Mainstream AC, and Top 40 Radio 78
6.2 Diffusion Curve for "Oye Mi Canto" by N.O.R.E., Nina Sky, and Daddy Yankee 82
6.3 Growth in Reggaetón Airplay (with Bootstrapped Confidence Intervals), 2004?2005 84
6.4 Trade Advertisement for the Sí TV Cable Channel 87
6.5 Diffusion Curve for "Rompe" by Daddy Yankee on Latin and Hip-Hop Radio 89
B.1 Diffusion Curves for Singles on the Rihanna Album Good Girl Gone Bad on Top 40 Stations with Varying Definitions of an "Add" 128
B.2 Top 40 Stations in Social Network Space with Filled Dots for Those Playing "My Humps" at Least Five Times in the Stated Week 129