Why Drake Isn’t as Popular as Michael Jackson
This week might have kicked off with a celebration of American independence, but fiercely Canadian pop force Drake is in the top spot of the country’s charts. “One Dance,” his simmering dancehall banger, leads the Hot 100 singles chart; Views, his fourth studio album, sits atop the Billboard 200. Drake‘s dual dominance has been in effect for seven straight weeks, matching a chart milestone that was set three-plus decades ago by none other than Michael Jackson.
That Drake has matched a record set by not only the biggest name in American pop, but its most massive album to date – Thriller and “Billie Jean” ruled their respective roosts back in 1983 – has sparked comparisons between the two that seem, on their face, a bit hyperbolic. “Drake Is Now Officially as Popular as Michael Jackson Was During Thriller,” a breathless Vulture headline announced, while Digital Music News broke out a comparison to Elvis.
Is Drake, undeniably a huge global star, someone who can make careers and who can turn his lint-rolling habits into an elaborate meme, really “officially as popular as” the King, or the King of Pop? The answer is probably no, in part because it largely depends on who you ask – and, more importantly, how they consume music.
Charting music’s popularity has always been a flawed process. Before SoundScan, which still tracks physical sales by barcode scans at an array of retailers, was introduced in 1991, Billboard relied on surveys of retailers to deduce its biggest hits. As chart watcher Chris Molanphy points out, the fungibility of humans probably resulted in albums like Van Halen’s 1984, The Cars’ Heartbeat City and the Ghostbusters soundtrack being undercounted while mega-selling albums like Thriller sat atop the 1984 albums chart for weeks at a time. Similarly, radio statistics were tracked with playlists and not actual spins until 1992, when the Hot 100 incorporated Broadcast Data Systems’ airplay tracking. (And even those moves toward hard data have aced out smaller players in the game.)
Since those first two switch-ups, America’s albums and singles charts have been tweaked to more fully represent the ways in which people were consuming music en masse; songs not released as singles became eligible for the Hot 100 in 1998, and digital track sales were added to the chart’s mix in 2005. But the big change – and the one that has solidified Drake’s seeming dominance – came when streaming music got added into the mix. The Hot 100 added streaming from services like Spotify and Apple in 2012, and video outlets like YouTube entered the mix in early 2013; in November 2014, the Billboard 200 became a “multi-metric consumption” chart where album sales were counted alongside streams (1,500 streams equaled a “streaming equivalent album”) and individual track sales (10 track sales equaled a “track equivalent album”).
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