![]() Billboardhas been charting it since the 1940s, when it was still called “race music.” When the magazine launched a black music chart in 1942, it went by the colorful name “Harlem Hit Parade.”Īfter a few years with the wince-inducing name “Race Records,” starting in the early ’50s the chart adopted various forms of the coinage “rhythm and blues” (thought up by legendary record executive Jerry Wexler). One perennial problem has been what to call this music that’s primarily recorded by, and aimed at, African-Americans. ![]() To appreciate what an aberration the current state of popular black music is, it’s worth walking through a few decades of chart history. We’d all be better off if it snapped out of its depression. More than three years after Top 40 radio took a hard right toward dance-pop, urban music has been left to founder. ![]() I would go further than that: Black music, in its various forms, is in a commercial funk-and it’s even worse than those album sales figures indicate. That story cuts across all artists (who aren’t Adele) and all musical genres.īut a lot of media outlets over the past week have homed in on the weak sales by Usher’s and Brown’s latest albums and noted that R&B music, in particular, seems to be in a slump. unemployment rate: Just when you think we’ve pulled through the worst of it, the stagnation sets in again. 1, arrived three weeks ago with first-week sales of just 128,000.Ĭonclusions? Well, for one thing, music sales are a bit like the U.S. That disc, his seventh studio album and his fourth straight to debut at No. The last few hundred copies that sold this summer were probably inspired by a flurry of promotional activity surrounding Usher’s latest album, Looking 4 Myself. ![]() An eye-popping 1.1 million of those copies were sold way back in the album’s debut week, in March 2004, when Usher’s hit “Yeah!” was riding high. That makes the eight-year-old Confessions the newest album to move 10 million. Billboard reports that it’s the first album to reach the diamond-sales mark since Eminem’s 2002 album The Eminem Show, which quietly crossed the line last October.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |