How to Game the Billboard Hot 100

Into It: A Vulture Podcast with Sam Sanders

Vulture & New York Magazine

Entertainment News, Tv & Film, News, Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Is it just us or has the Billboard Hot 100 felt... weird this year? It's the same chart that's seen Doja Cat's "Paint the Town Red" hit No. 1 — the first rap song to rise to the top spot in more than a year — as well as Oliver Anthony Music's controversial "Rich Men North of Richmond" and a remix of an old song by The Weeknd. Is the Billboard Hot 100 actually measuring what people are listening to these days? Can we trust it to tell us about the most popular music? Sam talks with Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding and Reanna Cruz about how Billboard ranks the Hot 100 and the ways that artists, fandoms, and political actors have changed the game... and learned how to game the charts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, you're listening to Into It from Vulture in New York magazine.
0:03.8	I'm Sam Sanders your host.
0:05.9	In this episode, I'm asking a question.
0:09.3	Well, too.
0:10.5	How do we and how should we rank hit songs?
0:14.1	Yeah, bitch, I said what I said.
0:16.9	I read the beef famous and said.
0:19.7	So this past week, a Doja Cat song hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
0:24.8	This is the Billboard chart that tracks the most popular songs in the country.
0:28.6	And Doja, hitting number one with this song, Pink the Town Red, it's actually a big deal
0:39.2	because for about a year, no rap song had hit number one on the Billboard charts.
0:45.1	Even as rap and hip-hop are the most dominant musical genres in the world.
0:51.3	I haven't been thinking about this a lot, though Hot 100 and how it measures what it measures.
0:57.4	Because for most of this year, the Billboard Hot 100 has seemed off.
1:05.2	For a moment in 2023, a seven-year-old song from the weekend was at number one.
1:11.8	Because it was popular on TikTok.
1:22.6	And then later this year, a country song by a new artist no one had ever heard of before
1:27.7	hit number one without a lot of radio play.
1:33.1	Because conservative activists told people to buy this song to fight the woke agenda.
1:50.8	Now if I'm myself asking these days, what is a Hot 100 even measuring?
1:55.6	Is it actually a good measure of the most popular music right now?
2:00.1	And is everyone just gaming this system to get to number one?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Vulture & New York Magazine, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Vulture & New York Magazine and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.