Willie Nelson: Big Booty, Midnight Rider

Quoted: Quoted: Willie Nelson: Big Booty, Midnight Rider Not a Willie fan, but did you ever remember the name of the country band that had a whole cd about bootlegging?

Thank you for reminding me.  I'll look now.

Quoted: Quoted: Billboard Hot 100 3/4th of that whole lists consists of hip hop

And not even GOOD Hip-Hop at that.  The wholesale takeover of the charts by Hip-Hop/Urban really happened around 2001, and it's been that way ever since.

I've been DJing again, and I was reviewing the charts from 1975 on to make sure I wasn't missing anything too important out of my music collection.  It turns out that I knew (and in most cases already owned) every song until around '98, when there started to be songs on the year's Top 100 that I've *still* never heard.  Even worse, I only had about 5 songs in 2001 and 2002, and only KNEW maybe 15 out of the 100 during those years.  I admit that things improved a bit in 2003, but there is a HUGE gap between the Rock and Hip-Hop audience starting around 2000 that, as a DJ, I have to know the audience, because there is almost NO cross-over.

In the 80s and early 90s, the Top 100 charts were a mix of rock, modern rock, hip-hop, and pop, but nearly everyone knew all of the songs, even if they didn't necessarily *like* them.  These days, neither of the divided audiences have any idea what's going on in the other.

This year's few crossover hits are:

Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
Modest Mouse - Float On
The Killers - Somebody Told Me
Audioslave - Like A Stone
Hoobastank - The Reason
Lyrics Born - Callin' Out
Black Eyed Peas - Where Is The Love?
Eminem - Just Lose It

Of these, more than half are established groups.

Even Britney, Christina, and Pink haven't done all that well with their recent albums.  Only Avril Lavine has gotten a lot of airplay out of the young female pop stars, and remember how big of a marketing push they get.

And even Hip-Hop's biggest new star (and one of the few with crossover), 50 Cent, hasn't done too much this year.

A lot of this can be blamed on the consolidations of both the record companies and radio.  There used to be two dozen large labels, with 8 majors.  We now have 4 huge companies that own everything but very tiny independents.  And they have focused on spending more money on fewer, bigger acts, and have dropped a lot of talented smaller acts, especially those that sound different than the few specific "mainstream" sounds.  And ALL the majors are pushing Hip-Hop HARD, because it's cheap to make and promote.

Then there is radio.  In particular, Clear Channel.  CC owns nearly half of all radio stations, and they come in and fire all the local talent and pipe in programming from their central programmers in Texas.  They've also been flipping lots of stations to Spanish Language, because of the ever-growning population of Spanish-Only speakers.  They are utterly despised EVERYWHERE they go, both by the communities and of course by the staffs they take over.  Their main competitor is Infinity Broadcasting, who is the lessor evil.  While they do some of the same things, they treat the locals much better and allow stations to have more control over their playlists and identities.

There are very few independant stations anymore, and that's *really* hurt things, because it's traditionally been independants that have filtered out a lot of the crap (much of it major-label crap) and found the gems.  Those days are largely over, outside of college radio, which itself is feeling a lot of the same pressure.

The labels blame all this on the Internet, but most of it they've brought on themselves via their management practices.

-Troy