The Poptimists Review Of The Year 2006: Dancing about Arguetexture

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Two somewhat difficult categories to administer today - the "argument of the year", difficult because only one thing really got widely nominated. And the "thing to dance (to)", difficult because nothing got nominated twice!

Here are the 'argument' nominees.

The Paris Hilton Wars: Is PH's album a triumph or a travesty? Should it be taken seriously? What are the hataz really playing at? Here's The Lex vs Plan B, and Dave Moore on Paris at Stylus.
Indie vs Emo in the Freaky Trigger Comments Box: This one will run and run. Delve in here and here.
Lordi: Worthy Eurovision Winners?: The argument that tore the Eurovision community apart - pantomime or "real rock"? And is that a good thing anyway? If anyone can point me to evidence for this argument I'd be grateful.

As for the dance to nominees...

"Monster" is a rock song about a hill and a monster.
"We Are Your Friends" is a much-loved golden oldie.
"Chicken Noodle Soup" is big on YouTube.
Magda is a tea-making DJ.
"We Share Our Mother's Health" is Scandiravian.

[Poll #893038]

You can still vote in earlier polls and nominate for the remaining categories.

Comments

[koganbot]

No, all of Kelly's singles from "Breakaway" made it to Britain, and actually the two that didn't go Top 20 were "Breakaway" (the first from the album) and "Walk Away" (the last). "Since U Been Gone," "Behind These Hazel Eyes," and "Because Of You" were all top ten, and I'm guessing that they got massive airplay as well. [The U.S. singles charts are based mainly on airplay, the British on sales, which makes the Brit charts a less reliable index of popularity, actually, since most of the audience for most music doesn't buy singles; digital downloading is starting to reverse this, however.]

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A weighted sales plus requests chart would be the best indicator, perhaps. Airplay I've never trusted because it's based on what radio stations think their listeners like (which might be what they actually like, depending on how good the stations' research is, but this is an entirely hidden variable).

In UK airplay terms, "Since U Been Gone" and "Because Of You" got big big airplay, "Hazel Eyes" less so. (Subjective data based on listening to Radio 1 in the office).

[koganbot]

Well, airplay is based on what their target audience wants to hear, which is another reason for its unreliability, since not all audiences are weighted equally. But singles sales are even more inaccurate, since some audiences don't buy singles at all (at least from the late '60s 'til downloads came along). My impression is that Billboard does its best to weigh all factors it can. But unless you have a massive govt. grant you can't do everything: e.g., for some airplay categories Billboard simply relies on number of spins, whereas for others it takes into account when and where the spin took place, which can make a huge difference in the size of the listening audience; I assume they'd do this for all categories if they had the staff and the resources; I think they try to rely on their own monitoring rather than trusting the stations to report accurately. Billboard has a formula that gets periodically adjusted. I don't know what the formula is: Perhaps the Billboard scientists keep it as secret as Coke keeps the Coke formula.

One thing that bugs me on the Billboard 200 (the album chart, which is all sales) is that they don't list the week's sales next to the ranking. This feels really dishonest. Maybe Billboard would have to pay Soundscan to publish them, but each week Billboard runs an article on the Top Ten that lists sales figures.

(Jeezy opened at number one, if you're interested.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's true- I somehow have it drilled into my head that 'Because Of You' wasn't a single here and thought there was another one in the US but now I think about it, that was 'Breakaway,' which obviously did come over here.

There's something very pubescent about 'Because Of You' that quite possibly turned off a lot of the album-buying agegroup, who may be who would have bought 'Walk Away' if they hadn't gone for the album, which had pretty good sales here to my knowledge. That song was on heavy rotation in the freeview music channels but I can't remember ever hearing it on radio. I have skewed feelings about 'Behind These Hazel Eyes' because it's got my name in the title and thus creeps me out.

I probably shouldn't attempt to say things about the charts, since the presense of JK and Joel on the Radio 1 chartshow renders it totally unlistenable and me totally unknowledgeable about the charts as a consequence.