Ash London (via thedailystyles)

Oh shit - who is responsible for this edit - are you trying to kill us all 💙🚑

13/9

Niall confirmed that “Too Much To Ask” is the next single and that “Flicker” is the name of the album!

What's going on with BTY's US radio spins? - US Top 40 gridlock

Hi y'all. A couple of weeks back, I sent @goodmorningtoyouuniverse this post about examining US historical charts. I was going to wait a couple more days when I had more days to examine before sending her this, but I saw a bunch of anons come to MB about it today and this is me meeting people where they are. :) (Also, a big shoutout to Sterre for daily updates and cheerleading.)

I’ve seen a number of people wondering why BTY hasn’t been moving up in the Top 40 charts even though it’s been gaining spins, if BTY is losing momentum or going to drop out of top 40, or if we shouldn’t panic. I don’t really have answers (but I would personally advise against panicking) – I do, however, have another set data to share.

Daily US mediabase updates are available at a number of places, including here (free signup required) and here (only goes to 30). The good news is that this is openly available to everyone who wants to see it; the bad news is that it updates every day and a previous day’s data becomes very difficult to find once the daily charts have been updated. I realized this, so began saving the daily charts about a week and a half ago.

Part of the problem with all this Mediabase data is that it probably should be cross-sectioned two ways: a song against its own previous performance and a song against its daily competitors. The best way to do that would be building an interactive graph model, which I’m sure the engineers at Nielsen already have done. I, however, don’t have that much time so we get screencaps.

Because it’d be a nightmare to format and read on Tumblr, all this data starting from August 15 (+one week’s LW data) are available in this Imgur album.

But here are three dates to quickly look at for reference:

August 15

August 20

August 24

Wow that’s a lot of numbers. What does it all mean?

First a disclaimer: I’m far from an expert on Top 40, Mediabase, or Billboard. I’ve been interested in this kind of stuff in the past, but I’ve never tracked a song this closely before, and I only have access to the same amount of information that I’ve now released into the wild.

So let’s talk about Top 40 gridlock.

1) Top 40 radio is a zero sum game. This makes sense intuitively: There are a fixed number of radio stations, a fixed number of hours a day, thus only a certain number of songs can be played every day. In order for songs to move up, other songs have to move down the chart. 

2) As I’ve mentioned before, it’s very normal for the position to stall or go down, even while the song is still rising. I know part of the stress might be that Louis seems to be stuck at quite a high number. If you look, the number of spins on today’s report (Aug 24) is 3,569 for #26, but that’s a higher number of spins than #23 Hailee Steinfeld at 3,376 on Aug 15, and also more than #22 Zedd & Liam at 3,539 on Aug 8.

The “problem” right now is that there are songs rising above BTY, and the summer songs have a massive number of spins are still coming down – slowly. Here are some songs coming down that BTY will likely be able to jump soon: Versace on the Floor (19), Castle on the Hill (22), Post Malone - Congratulations (24). Depending on how things go, BTY might be able to jump over Fetish too. I know the next few weeks are going to be pretty heavy with new artist releases for fall, but that’s the nature of the game.

How do we know BTY hasn’t peaked yet? Are his spins are losing momentum?

Usually the rule of thumb I’ve heard is that an artist will promote a song for 8-10 weeks. It either takes with the audience then, or it starts to fall off the chart. I’m not sure how true this remains still, but there are a couple of songs that meet that criteria: Versace on the Floor (June 13, 2017), Down - Fifth Harmony (June 2, 2017 - now at #47 on radio).

I prefer +spins since last week to +spins since previous day since that seems to better gauge the momentum of a song. Usually, a song with a negative bullet or songs in the +150 spins since LW zone have peaked or are starting to peak, as they’ll get jumped by other climbing songs in top 40. For example, Macklemore’s song has consistently had +200-300 spins since LW since I started tracking; it hasn’t peaked yet, but it’s fallen all the way from #26 to #30 in terms of position. You can especially tell when a song has peaked because they’ll fall off the charts rather quickly – probably at 500-1500 less spins than the previous week.

The +430 since LW for today is probably BTY’s lowest spin increase since I started saving the daily data, but it’s about normal for what it had prior to hitting top 30. Also, I’d like to point out that Slow Hands was at about +300 since LW on the first day of saved data but it’s now over +1100 as of Aug 24. But consistently decreasing +Spins since LW is bad momentum – from the looks of it, both the Chainsmokers and Zedd & Liam’s song might be peaking early. Unfortunately there’s just limited data right now on BTY’s trajectory. 

Should we be optimistic or worried?

Look, I think there’s been a lot of really amateur mistakes from Louis’ team since this promo started. Also, if you haven’t read them yet, I’d point to these two posts today about his team’s strategy for promo: fans’ skin in the game and Sony’s marketing strategy around fandom.

In terms of marketing strategy, I think fans are rightfully annoyed and pessimistic. In terms of actual chart performance, I’m personally neutral. I don’t want to sugarcoat it because I think BTY could be doing better on radio, but it’s probably also not as dire as some people might feel it is right now.

Anyway, this is only a piece of the whole puzzle Louis’ team and Sony have, so who knows. The only thing we can really do is continue to stream and request.

Thanks to MB for letting me borrow your soapbox. If you have any questions (to whatever extent I can answer them) my askbox is open here.

Here’s a submission I received about the radio play since there were a lot of anons about it today and I know nothing about it. So, for your reading pleasure ^^. They’ve also got their inbox open if you have any questions.

SHE’S OBSESSED WITH 1D 😂💖