A Producer’s Dream –  Halloween Night in Nashville.

A guest post by Stephen Wrench

I remember the night well; it was Halloween night, 1985. I was in Nashville working with a good friend, the late great producer, Neil Wilburn.  Neil’s credits include Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Waylon and Willie and many others. I was working with Neil on a song for Dwight Goodin, a Met’s pitcher, winner of the Cy Young Award. This was before “pro tools” and “voice correction” and to no avail we spent the evening coaching Dwight to sing well enough for a record release. We decided to break for Halloween. Neil wanted me to ride by the studio with him to visit his friend, Keith Stegall who was working on a song written by Don Schlitz.

As I entered the studio I met a young artist. When he opened his mouth to sing something magical happened. The band played with passion and the music that was created that night created a legend. The artist was Randy Travis and the song was “On The Other Hand”.

I observed  Keith Stegall, the producer, as he was able to recognize a great song and determine where to go artistically and stylistically. That song/album not only launched Travis’s career, it reset the genre’s direction for the next decade.

That Halloween Night is a night  that I will never forget as I was able to learn from some of the greatest producers and be a witness to history in the making.  It was a dream Halloween Night for this producer.

The longer I am in this business I realize that great producers are one part psychologist, two parts music expert, and three parts psychic. A  great producer can actually “hear” what a production should sound like before it’s even recorded. A great producer will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to focus on creating music with real passion behind it. The kind that “makes the hair stand on your arms”.

Since that fateful night, I have continued to be blessed to work with many artists.  Whether it has been with a budding indie artist or an established artist, my goal is the same – to help  artists create their music to match the stories they want to share with the world; to create some of that “magic” I was fortunate to have witnessed on that Halloween Night.

It’s already been gamed multiple times.  Now, the Billboard Album Charts are about to become a complete industry joke, not to mention a complete waste of resources.

Once upon a time, the Billboard album charts mattered, because albums mattered.  But instead of shifting their charts towards other formats like downloads, streaming, and playlists as albums died, Billboard and its tracking partner Nielsen Soundscan have repeatedly insisted on cramming these formats into an album chart that makes no sense.

Now, calculating labels are starting to game the album chart according to these ridiculous new (and constantly changing) formulas, essentially gaming number one albums without actually selling albums.  And yes, there are charting ‘albums’ now that have sold zero copies.

Last time I checked, 1,500 streams equaled an ‘album sale,’ but there are dozens of different qualifiers that seem to be made up on the spot.  Basically, Billboard’s rules make no sense, and increasingly do nothing to reward actual album sales.

Which means artists like Bon Iver and Arcade Fire, both of whom release real albums, have no way to reliably measure their success because their getting crowded out by fake-me-out albums by DJ Khaled and Epic Records.

Speaking of which, the New York Times did a really good piece on a recent top 10 Billboard album, Epic AF.  Epic Records, part of Sony Music Entertainment, essentially stuffed a compilation up the Billboard album charts without releasing any new material.  The way they did this was simple: they simply gamed the new Billboard/Nielsen rules that count streams and downloads of singles towards the success of an album.  So, songs from Future, DJ Khaled, Young Thug, and French Montana that were meteoric on their own suddenly counted towards an album that you couldn’t buy.

Previously, Epic had been releasing these singles as singles, because everyone listens to singles these days (often as part of playlists).  But by suddenly connecting all of those singles to an album nobody had heard of (or purchased), Epic created a top 10 album out of thin air!

Sneaky, right?  Great for Epic, but really, really bad for Billboard, whose album charts are increasingly becoming a big, fat, irrelevant joke inside the music industry.   But this is just getting started.  Already, Drake gamed a number one album by sticking a previously-released ‘Hotline Bling’ onto his latest release, and other artists are releasing impossibly long albums to game their Billboard chart positions (more singles = better album position).

Meanwhile, Epic Records sneakily re-connected a number of Epic AF singles to DJ Khaled’s latest release, Major Key, to score a number one release.  BS, right?  Well, this isn’t just about bragging rights, because it turns out that number one albums get headlines, which get more sales and marketing.  All for a chart that’s based on arcane, ridiculous mathematical gaming.

The RIAA, equally dialed into antiquity, keeps handing out awards based on album ‘shipments,’ as if the word stopped in 1999.  But making this worse, the RIAA and Billboard have their own different set of album counting rules, which might explain why the RIAA recently handed Rihanna a platinum certification for the album ANTI even though Billboard and Nielsen counted just 460 copies.

So what’s next?  Get ready for a flood of gamed albums competing for the top of the Billboard 200, with many non-existent outside of the charts and some Spotify search.  Epic AF isn’t an album that anyone has purchased, it’s just a compilation of hits.  But looking ahead, every label is now compiling new playlists into new ‘albums,’ with the intent of getting their own trophy on the shelf.

In the process, the Billboard 200 is now about to be the biggest running joke of the music industry.  Yet it still matters as a brand, which means getting a number one album translates into more money for the artists and labels who score.  Which is why everyone’s wasting their time on this.

So what’s the solution?  The big problem here is that the music world has changed since 2001, yet Billboard is pretending that all of these new consumption habits can somehow be translated into an antiquated album format.  But why not just chart the newer formats without all the creative math?  Because if there’s anything that connects back to the actual album, it’s the playlist, which is essentially just another collection of songs.

In fact, playlists are oftentimes the biggest drivers of new music discovery and fan attention.  Just like albums used to be. Above article courtesy of Digital Music News 

Some charts that matter to Indie Artists are charts like the European Indie Music Chart . This chart works on listener votes. Thats real. Another chart is world music stage and their top 10 Indie countdown. Musik Radio Promotions works with these charts and others that matter to Indie artists.