Morgan Wallen

This is why I stopped paying much attention to the Hot 100 for a long time now. While I know that it (probably) reflects the way people experience music in the streaming era, these "album bombs" just make it hard to take seriously. The same is true of the current version of the country and R&B charts, which just use the same data used to determine the Hot 100. For that reason, I moved to the genre radio charts a long time ago.

And yes, it's impossible to compare achievements from today with those of decades past. Is there any doubt, in anyone's mind, that Elvis or the Beatles would have charted entire albums if streaming had existed in their heydays?

For old timer chart watchers the Modern Era is a shock, and the knee-jerk reaction is to rely on the Radio-based charts as the closest thing to 'the good old days'.

The only issue there is that - while Radio is far from dead - its reach / influence is down demonstrably. At some point this decade, it will have no relevance. As someone who worked in the Industry, it sucks, but the writing's been on the wall for a decade.

Due to streaming, radio no longer really breaks new music to the masses like it used to and is more comfort food, relying on recurrents and gold hits to pacify passive listeners.

Album Bombs are horrible - but accurate.

I scan the charts from Mediabase at All Access to update my current music folders. The Morgan Wallen track, What I Want, is currently #20 on the Top 40 chart on Mediabase.

As someone who works in the music industry, I can tell you that most industry professionals I speak to say the Hot 100 is a useless chart for them.

As far as I know, none of the national top 40 radio countdowns have used the Billboard hot 100 for many years. There probably are radio regulations that prevent one artist having 20-30+ songs played in a 4-hour period.

Looking at this "album bomb" phenomenon in a reverse situation (and I never really have before), if somehow streaming existed back in the '70s & 80s, for any artist who had a really large fanbase (one example: Barry Manilow), most of his fans would have streamed all his album tracks on the week of release. But let's say, "You Could Show Me", "Starting Again" and "Bobbie Lee (What's the Difference, I Gotta Live") all made the top 10. How many people (other than true Manilow fans) would even know these top 10 hits? But in my hypothetical example, these would go down in the history books as top 10 hits. Frankly, I'm glad we can look back at the top 10 hits of the '70s and '80s as the hits they were, rather than album-bombs filling much of the top 10 with "hits" that no one other than fans of the group/artist of the week would remember.

No disrespect to Barry Manilow or his fans (which includes me). Just giving one example, but I could have said John Denver, the Carpenters, Air Supply, or many heavy metal bands for that matter :)

Edited by EdisonLite - 15 hours 47 minutes ago at 1:55pm

Yes, I remember that. And the Beatles, too, IIRC. To me, it's kind of insane to think the cast of Glee was more successful than Elvis (in terms of Hot 100 hits).