Add to those fans people like me, who love the folk/blues-influenced vocals and instrumentation of this recording and wouldn't mind mainstream country getting a bit more back to the basics. That this guy, Chris Stapleton, Zach Bryan and Ashley McBryde can get airplay at all amidst all the mindless partying and pickup truck songs radio has preferred through most of this century is literally music to our ears. Many factors are contributing to country music's current resurgence besides knuckle-dragging election deniers binge-listening to a few songs on Spotify or YouTube.
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Rich Men North of Richmond #1
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
Comparing now to 2019 is an apples to oranges comparison. Or more like, apples were just fine until a raging disease hit the entire orchard and the crop is finally starting to return to somewhat normal levels.
As for the economy failing a lot of people, that's hardly a recent development. The middle class has been in decline for decades, and the working class is even worse off. We seem to be in a non-stop cycle of boom and bust, but the booms seem to help out the top earners a lot more than the bottom, and as you said, the former are able to handle the busts better than the latter. The gap widens every time, and it seems like the system is helping out the top earners and giving scraps to everyone else. How many people lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, etc. during the 2008 crash? Millions. Yet the bailout money went to the banks, and the executives used it to pay themselves bonuses. Or on a personal level, my son in law - who runs a successful business - got hundreds of thousands in PPP loans during the pandemic, and didn't have to pay back a dime. Me? I got a job that paid so little I qualified for Medicaid.
Billionaires are fighting over who's got the coolest rocket ship, while their employees are peeing in a bottle and applying for food stamps. Damn...I think I feel a song coming together...
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The subject of some posts has gone off the rail and is not even remotely related to radio or the song in question. I am not closing this thread, but any further far-off-subject posts will be deleted. But I'll only do that after the rest of today so it does not seem I am saying the last word myself. But the off subject posts will no longer be accepted after that.
I think this is a fair treatment of all the divergent viewpoints but we have to keep in mind that this board is about radio.
I think this is a fair treatment of all the divergent viewpoints but we have to keep in mind that this board is about radio.
Rich Men entered Pandora's most played chart, but it's not #1.
www.countryinsider.com
‘Rich Men North Of Richmond’ Enters Pandora Top Spins Chart.
Country has three of the first five tracks on Pandora’s Top Spins chart this week, but Oliver Anthony Music’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” isn’t one of them. That track
Here's a commentary linking the Hot 100 success of Rich Men with what he calls "the death of radio." The author is a boomer who used to work in the record business. He tries to make sense of the modern media world from the music point of view.
What Bob misses is that the Hot 100 is all-genre, and that fans of one song or artist can game the system to get their favorite to #1. The Taylor Swift fans do it all the time. It's a form of tyranny, where the fans of one song can put it on repeat indefinitely to skew the numbers. Radio stations are more balanced, and curate their programming to satisfy broader audiences. That's the difference. One isn't better than the other. It's just a choice people make, between on-demand content or curated content.
The Death Of Radio?
All you have to know is “Rich Men North of Richmond” went to number one on the streaming chart. Which is a bit complicated, because there’s on demand streaming and radio-style str…
lefsetz.com
What Bob misses is that the Hot 100 is all-genre, and that fans of one song or artist can game the system to get their favorite to #1. The Taylor Swift fans do it all the time. It's a form of tyranny, where the fans of one song can put it on repeat indefinitely to skew the numbers. Radio stations are more balanced, and curate their programming to satisfy broader audiences. That's the difference. One isn't better than the other. It's just a choice people make, between on-demand content or curated content.
Of course, the airplay Hot 100 is gamed by the labels to a certain extent, with "push weeks" making No. 1 songs out of tunes that logically should have been losing momentum just because it's that label's turn to get a No. 1 song or it would reward an artist with a new album coming out or a big concert tour starting. But at least push weeks end after seven days, and the songs that are pushed usually drop markedly in airplay frequency at the local level once they've had that turn at the top.Here's a commentary linking the Hot 100 success of Rich Men with what he calls "the death of radio." The author is a boomer who used to work in the record business. He tries to make sense of the modern media world from the music point of view.
The Death Of Radio?
All you have to know is “Rich Men North of Richmond” went to number one on the streaming chart. Which is a bit complicated, because there’s on demand streaming and radio-style str…lefsetz.com
What Bob misses is that the Hot 100 is all-genre, and that fans of one song or artist can game the system to get their favorite to #1. The Taylor Swift fans do it all the time. It's a form of tyranny, where the fans of one song can put it on repeat indefinitely to skew the numbers. Radio stations are more balanced, and curate their programming to satisfy broader audiences. That's the difference. One isn't better than the other. It's just a choice people make, between on-demand content or curated content.
The blogger, whoever he is, is stating the obvious, except it's not really the death of radio, it's the decline and redefinition of the music industry, with radio included. Everything is being redefined. When streaming became the dominant form of music consumption, the music industry and radio industry both had to adapt. Both have seen drops in revenues over the past 15-20 years. But then, the musicians, who create the content, have also seen relative drops in revenues. Every element of the entertainment industry is adapting, redefining, and changing their business model. They have to. The internet is increasingly dominant as a delivery platform, and the competition is infinite, at least in theory.Here's a commentary linking the Hot 100 success of Rich Men with what he calls "the death of radio." The author is a boomer who used to work in the record business. He tries to make sense of the modern media world from the music point of view.
The Death Of Radio?
All you have to know is “Rich Men North of Richmond” went to number one on the streaming chart. Which is a bit complicated, because there’s on demand streaming and radio-style str…lefsetz.com
What Bob misses is that the Hot 100 is all-genre, and that fans of one song or artist can game the system to get their favorite to #1. The Taylor Swift fans do it all the time. It's a form of tyranny, where the fans of one song can put it on repeat indefinitely to skew the numbers. Radio stations are more balanced, and curate their programming to satisfy broader audiences. That's the difference. One isn't better than the other. It's just a choice people make, between on-demand content or curated content.
This Oliver Anthony guy made a pile of money off his single. 33 million plays on YT? Maybe he made $130K or so off that platform, off those 33M plays. Great. Staind made over $100 million in one year, off just one album. That isn't including their CD single sales that year.
I don't think we're seeing the "death of radio", and this song is no more an indicator of it than hip-hop artist Gunna taking over 12% of the entire hot 100 chart in one week (six months ago) before disappearing back into the internet somewhere. Radio is still radio. It's just going more and more online. The instant success of "Rich Men" is sort of like Gunna -- indicators of the new business model in music consumption new artists spike and then fade. Some stick around a while.
Maybe Oliver Anthony will gain a bigger career off this song's success. Maybe he won't. I guess we'll find out.
But Oliver Anthony doesn't have a label.
50 million views in 21 days
Keep in mind that doesn't mean 50 million people viewed it. It's possible that a million people each watched it 50 times.
Right. And his song is not getting anywhere close to No. 1 on the airplay chart. Probably won't even if he signs with Big Loud tomorrow because a lot of the anti-establishment/libertarian types who love the song now will be branding him a sellout.
Of course, if Big Loud does sign him and turns "Rich Men" into a duet with Morgan Wallen, then all bets are off!
It's possible 1 person viewed it 50 million times. Simple math. Did I say 50 million people viewed it?
I didn't say you did.
This tired old talking point? Right from the GOP’s sheet of lies. Take some isolated supposed supposed example and portray it as widespread, those damn cheats robbing the good, honest people out of the minimum wage we don’t dare raise because…’Murica.
But the singer has made it clear he's not blaming the cheats, but the people who make the laws. They are the rich men north of Richmond.
As I think about this, there is nothing new. As a pre-teen in the first year of rock 'n' roll, I discovered that with about 70¢ I could ride my bike to Woolworth's and get a song I liked that I had heard WERE or WJW and take it home. I would then play it... and play it and play it. Over and over.
The next day after school I would play it, but fewer times. And so on for a week or two. Then it became part of a stack of records that might get played occasionally. But my interest was like a volcano, with huge intensity for a short period.
I could give lessons to Taylor Swift fans, although the whole bit about changing the needle on the tone arm is a bit dated.
Oh, sidebar time: other kids "on the block" and I would trade records once we tired of them. So those danged record companies lost lots of sales because we swapped tunes instead of buying them. Our street had no firewall, so those record folks could not keep us from sharing songs without buying them.
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But he gets paid per view. Each view is a streaming event, and I think all of them count for revenue purposes. So it's still a big of money for him.
If I'm wrong, please correct me.
That said, I get what you say. It could be 10 million people playing the track five times each. Or 5 million viewing it 10 times each, which would lower the number of 'fans'.
But on the revenue side, I think the artist / record co / artist rep / artist LLC / whatever gets their digital royalty per stream, regardless of whether it's one guy like me playing Stranded by Gojira 50 times, or some curious radio person playing Oliver Anthony's song once and then going "Nope, not my cup of tea." And 50 million streams is somewhere in the neighborhood of $200K, depending on the exact amount YT pays per stream.
Now, if this were 2012 and we were talking 99 cent downloads instead of streams, 50 million of those units would have been a lot more money. At the same time, a lot of people wouldn't pay for a DL on an unknown artist, so there's that aspect as well.
He gets paid .0008 cents per stream by law. That comes out to $40,000. He ain't getting rich off this song.
My point though is radio is based on audience. Streaming is on views. One to many vs one to one. Two different metrics.
More like Tayranny!
Working backwards through your points...
Maybe he will, but it would have to be more than just the one song. It's not impossible to make a career out of being popular on YouTube. I'm into cars, and one of the car review channels I've watched for awhile has just shy of 5 million subscribers, started an online car auction site, and it led to an investment group making a $37 million dollar deal with him for a chunk of his business. Can Anthony parlay this into something bigger? Maybe he can combine releasing songs with a regular commentary? If he can get those subscriber numbers up, get people to support him through something like Patreon, and get some sponsors, maybe he doesn't need a label or radio at all.
When it comes to the "death of radio," I can kinda get where the blogger is coming from. From where I sit (outside of the business for a few years now), I'd say it is definitely declining, but I'm not sold on the idea that it's adapting very well to the new reality. Yes, radio is still radio, and simply moving the same station online isn't adaptation. It's anecdotal evidence, but (and I keep bringing this up), the young people I work with at the tech bro company don't listen to the radio...online or otherwise. More on that in a moment...
Staind? Yes, as Aaron Lewis himself has said many times, that song (and album) made a "sh*t-ton of money," but that was over 2 decades ago. That era is gone forever.
Maybe Oliver Anthony only made $130k off that one song. But he got 100 percent of the pittance that YouTube pays for "spins." If he signed with a major label, he'd make even less, because they'd take their cut. Musicians are figuring out that you don't need to follow the traditional route to be successful.
Some of those kids I work with are stoked to see Polyphia in concert when they come to town in a couple months. The band is about as far as you can get from Oliver Anthony. While they haven't had one song with 55 million views, they have one with 30 million, another with 20, and according to a quick Google search are sitting at around 400 million total views. They have endorsement deals with a variety of companies, sell out all their shows, and are by all accounts doing very well for themselves. They're signed to a small independent label and peaked on the US album chart at 33. Needless to say they have little or no radio airplay.
As a YouTuber I watch on the regular says, "it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day."
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