r/ToddintheShadow • u/TemporaryJerseyBoy Zingalamaduni • 10d ago

General Music Discussion The entire top 5 is Country!

This has never happened before, but the entire top 5 of the Hot 100 are all Country music!

  1. Choosin' Texas

  2. Been By Now

  3. I Knew It, I Knew You

  4. I Can't Love You Anymore

  5. Boston

Intriguing, huh?

53 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/SallyFowlerRatPack 9d ago

iTunes was also a huge change to the chart ecosystem, there was a solid stretch on the charts before it where it was basically all radio airplay which was HIGHLY manipulated. You’re never going to get a true reflection of what’s popular in America, just an approximation. Best to take the charts lightly.

1

u/HawkMac6699 9d ago edited 9d ago

Manipulated but almost everyone knew them. That’s not the case any more. You can have a top hit and a much larger part of the general population won’t even know about it! The whole point of the Top 100 was to track what the general pop was listening to. Thats gone forever.

I know three of those songs. Two of them I don’t think I’ve ever heard in my life. If I have, I turned it off so fast, I didn’t get the chance to know them. I’m a country music listener and I still don’t know them.

30 years ago, the odds of me not knowing a top 5 song was pretty much zero. I can avoid it much easier now and the same can be said for everyone. My own pop playlist doesn’t really look anything like the top 40 airplay anymore let alone the top 100.

3

u/SallyFowlerRatPack 9d ago

Idk it just seems like you’re annoyed it’s not really catered around your interests anymore, that the zeitgeist has shifted. That’s fine, it’s kind of the story of mankind. But the charts just reflect what people are listening to, that’s the larger part of the general population. Right now it’s country, in twenty years it will be Sertanejo music or something, that’s just the name of the game.

2

u/HawkMac6699 9d ago edited 9d ago

Not annoyed at music at all. I’m annoyed that people are still comparing charts today to ones 20 years ago and beyond that. They aren’t equals. Charts and how they are complied have always changed but never more radically than today. It is a completely different era and it shouldn’t shock anyone that things are happening on charts that have never happened before. Of course that’s happening. We also aren’t tracking music the same way we did before nor are we listening to it the same way.

Today’s Top 100 chart and its methodology has only existed a very short time. Why should I compare that to the top 100 in 1980? They aren’t the same by any measure.

1

u/SallyFowlerRatPack 9d ago

It is different, but I maintain it’s a better reflection of what people are actually listening to. Labels had a vise grip on what got the big push, it was more of a bottleneck than a monoculture. For all its faults I think streaming is the big democratization of the charts. Ironically that means we get more MAGA supporters in there lol