The 00s

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a graph of some QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH what I have done.



The data set is all records to have got into the Top 10 during January-June each year. Genre classification has been done by me - where I couldn't remember a record or artist AT ALL I left it off the graph, which is why the %ages don't add up (this affected about 4 records total). Seasonal records - eg World Cup songs - are also in the %ages but not on the graph. I didn't classify the Elvis reissues in 2005 at all.

Categories are blurry - especially in 2000/1/2 when dance and 'urban' and pop were all quite interrelated. Vocal, song-based garage records, for instance, may have ended up in any one of the three though I tried to be consistent.

Urban includes hip-hop, R&B, ragga and soul - R&B dominates within this from approx. the middle of the decade.

Nu-metal I tended to put into "rock", emo I tend to put into "indie" - this is a deeply arbitrary classification, obviously. There was a definite split between "rock" and "indie" in the past which I think is no longer the case, the two categories are quite overlappy now.

I haven't tried to filter 'teenpop' out from 'mumpop' or any other kind.

With all these caveats I think the graph tells some interesting tales and gives a bit of evidence to ideas that have been floating around here.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

OK I will try and sort out the picture...

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

well done :)

i'm surprised pop has started going back up to be fair, gut feeling is it's flatlining (robyn notwithstanding).

maybe for better statistical analysis you could pass round the spreadsheet and let others categorise, and see what their graphs looked like...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

There are lots of subdividions within pop though - the pop of the Allen/Winehouse/Robyn sort is definitely on the up, the pop of the Britney sort has virtually disappeared - we shall see if Aly & AJ overcome this.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There's a few things in "pop" which could just about also be in "urban" - eg Nelly Furtado. It's still fairly low!

I have some 1992 and 1997 data too.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i would ask why, but i ph34r the answer...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well originally I was doing 5 year dips, then I thought oh sod it, and did the whole 00s.

I will go back and do the 90s. The categories really start breaking down though.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

but if you did it with a wider number of categories (or a wider interpretation of categories) you would get more meaningful results, maybe...

fsvo meaningful, obv.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'd need to expand the scope of the survey tho - include the top 20 or top 30 - doing just the Top 10 sets the bar pretty high, I think things would even out a lot if I expanded it and where's the fun in that ;)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

no, but if you just did the top ten but split out, say, emo and mumpop and rap OR did two level categorisation eg pop>mumpop, you would get a more [AHEM] granular breakdown innit...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Wow it's actually really odd to see my vague suspicions and stuff actually quantified and proven - ie the UK has OFFICIALLY gotten MORE RACIST in recent years!

Ugh that horrible green line. Die British people die.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There's a bit of hope in that there might be a cycle - the 'Urban' category is at the same level now as in 1997 (back then a lot more hip-hop and soul in it) and the indie and rock ones are slightly higher than then - but the proportion of dance has halved, which accounts for that increase.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Excellent pop science there Tom!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I'm glad we are free to use the totally-not-racialist term 'Urban' here in the LJ speakeasy away from the glare of NRQ

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I still don't like it! Scare quotes at all times please. But it is a handy catch-all.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I used it because the Lex and Moggy were using it in the conversation that started this line of thought. If I do the 90s ones ("if") it will become increasingly specious.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

It's clear proof that there is a new music that's taking over the nation, and it's called indie.

FACT

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

nu-metal = rap

Further proof that Britain is racialist

[koganbot]

No country.

If you expand to take in subcategories, you should include the following: Pop That Is Really Rock (Kelly C. and Ashlee S.), Dance That Is Really Alternative Rock (i.e., any dance music from Britain that isn't bosh), and Pop That Is Really Alternative Rock (Lily Allen, Robyn).

Some of you will find those subcategory titles unnecessarily complimentary to rock, of course, but I think they're accurate.

Re: Further proof that Britain is racialist

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Thar be also some dance from Britain that is secretly hip hop.

Re: Further proof that Britain is racialist

[koganbot]

True.

Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I am very surprised at how much "urban" (I echo Lex's comment about it needing the scare quotes but also echo Tom's re: what else do you call it) has plummeted, sales-wise. However, the biggest shock to me is how little rock is sold! Maybe it is because I am a secret rockist (probably true) but I was under the impression there were absolute shedloads of the stuff being peddled circa. Nu-metal; am very shocked to discover it's always resided in the lower... quartile of the graph.

Do very much like that jagged series of points around 2001 where 'urban' and 'rock' suddenly peak and pop drops like an aerodynamic stone. Is very interesting in terms of me not realising exactly how dramatic that was, at the time. Do the urban/rock gain percentages add up to being equal, overall, to the pop drop?

Re: Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Err, actually, pretend I know how to read graphs/lurn percentages and never asked that last question, shall we?

Re: Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

It's still strong as ever in America. I wonder what the same graph would look like here.

Re: Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

n.b.: Not enough to actually do it myself.

Re: Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I will need to do MOAR analysis on the figures when I get back into "work" next week but the interesting thing for me is that Lex's hunch - that the fates of 'urban' and indie are linked - seems to be correct (more so than indie/pop or urban/pop anyway).

Re: Ooh look, I can completely misuse the word 'quartile.'

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

To me it looks more that the fates of urban and dance are v. linked. Although indie and urban are appearing to, err, go in opposite directions (dammit I did a whole year and a half of statistics and cannot remember anything about talking about graffs) at the moment, dance and urban seem linked all along the graph. They're both plummeting, of course but as urban dives down to lurk with the moshers, dance is rallying a bit.

Int'restin statistic

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

According to My Friend Matt, the percentage decrease in CD sales in the first six months of this year exactly matches the percentage increase in vinyl sales. Not the numbers, obviously but the percentages.

Does anyone know if numbers of decks etc. purchased have also gone up? Is DJing properly having some kind of renaissance in the form of indie kids doing it rly, rly badly?

Re: Int'restin statistic

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

According to an article I read somewhere a lot of the vinyl resurgence is people wanting to buy An Artefact that represents some music they love, but they're not actually playing it, just keeping it or putting it on their walls in some cases.

re Rock - worth pointing out that a LOT of the "rock" is stuff like U2 and Coldplay and RHCP and Oasis rather than anything which rocks.

I now have the figures back to 1990 - rock was big in the early 90s, though still not rocking.

I should do this with albums maybe!

Re: Int'restin statistic

[koganbot]

I should do this with albums maybe!

Yeah, I was going to say...

Re: Int'restin statistic

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Ahh, maybe that's it- rock does tend to sell more in album formats I suppose. That said, if that was including Oasis and people then that suggests the plight of the world's metallers is even more dire than originally appeared.

That's interesting, in a sort of iPod generation way. I had suspected that the act of buying music, due to the fact you can *get* and listen to music off BitTorrent etc. had become more of a statement than anything else and it would sort of make sense than vinyl, which is a much bigger statement than a CD in terms of display, had gotten more popular.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

you mean the british top 10, right? 'urban' sounds like such a weird category to me in that context. i realize there is something one calls 'british urban music', but do the real or imagined similarities between it and american urban music create any expectations (for poptimist chart-punditry) that are perhaps unrealistic? (i'd also like to see the categories in general broken down into country-of-origin, just to see whether there isn't more balance in the rock and pop categories than the other ones.)