A station owner recently asked for and received my Country library playlists; Recurrent, Gold, Classics and Legends. He’d had some uneasiness about many of the songs he was hearing on his station; some of them just didn’t seem ‘right’. As he began updating and adjusting the library and was immediately pleased with the result, he sent an eamail asking which chart I relied on. Here’s how I answered:
for tracking top 10 performance,
i use MediaBase now. switched to it about 5 years ago.
before that, Billboard. i used the R&R chart until it
folded.
again, this is only for noting Top 10 performance,
the confirming fact that a song should be a candidate for
inclusion in the Recurrent and Gold lists in the future.
‘candidate’ because not every top 10 record makes
the cut. i hone in on Top 5 for those lists as it is
more reliable.
charts for new songs judgement/consideration are
culled from many different lists. i see what’s on
billboard and mediabase. more importantly are
the digital charts. iTunes shows what’s being bought
Youtube views are an indicator of bubbling interest.
same goes for the Shazam chart.
and the Slacker EQ chart. this one measures how long
a person listened to a track, did she listen all the way to the
end of the song, did he add it to his ‘favorites’, did
they ‘share’ it on social media.
since its debut this summer the chart to watch is: buzzanglemusic.com
this one is a comprehensive aggregation of sales from
all platforms.
as my sage mentor told me way way way back: the two indicators
of a record’s programming value are 1st: requests 2nd sales
and the dollar spent to buy a song is the more important of the two.
the conundrum that we can’t solve is: WHO is buying the record.
Country is primarily and Adult 35+ format.
under 30 demos are far and away more likely to buy and share
music than past-30 adults are. so that gives the charts their
present skew towards BroCountry and the Country-rap glut.
much of this is “not Country” to more mature ears, those who
are much more likely to listen to broadcast radio than ipods.
so, a Country music director needs to be careful with
acts like Dan + Shay and new guy Kane Brown, both of whom are
doing fairly well on all charts now.
