Idolator

In a week where it seems the global financial crisis is inescapable, America decides that a buck is a nice price to spend on music, and the Top 40 of Billboard's Hot 100 sees a wave of new best-selling singles—including two in the Top 10 and a massive leap by a new No. 1 smash.

With that 79-place jump (which, ahem…I called last week), T.I. accomplishes two major chart feats. New No. 1 “Live Your Life” featuring Rihanna sets the record for the biggest leap to the top in history—which would be unremarkable, given the frequency with which this record has been broken recently, if not for the fact that T.I. is beating himself, having reset the mark just six weeks ago.

More impressively, by ousting his own “Whatever You Like,” T.I. joins a very elite club: acts that succeeded themselves at No. 1. During the Hot 100’s entire 50-year history, there have only been eight, and if you ignore featuring-artist credits, the number is six.

Besides these chart feats, T.I.’s hit also sets a record for the biggest debut sales week for a digital single. But we might want to get used to that happening. Already, iTunes is reporting a wave of new best-sellers as the music industry’s last blockbuster holiday hits full swing.

In a sleepy week for Billboard's Hot 100, Atlanta rap king T.I. maintains his grip on the No. 1 spot, his fifth nonconsecutive week there, with “Whatever You Like.”

The “jump ball” I expected to break within the Top Three turned out to be a dead ball, as the three hits hold their positions. T.I. actually outsold both Pink and Kanye West at buck-a-song retailers, blunting those two challengers’ previous digital-sales advantages and padding his already huge lead at radio. West, in particular, will probably muddle along for a while now, as his sales two weeks later have fallen off, and his airplay is emerging, steadily but slowly.

Besides, T.I. appears be settling into a long run atop the chart, and within a week or two it might be with a different song. His newest hit, previewed three weeks ago with Rihanna at the MTV Video Music Awards, leads a parade of fall contenders that will likely explode on next week’s chart. So in effect, this week feels like the calm before the pre-holiday storm.

When this column launched one year ago this week, Kanye West was locked in a mortal struggle for the top of Billboard's Hot 100, first defeating and then retreating from a smash by Soulja Boy.

Twelve months later, the smash holding down the No. 1 spot has changed—this time, it’s from a more seasoned hip-hop figure, T.I.—but the challenger is the same. West storms the ramparts again, this time with his all-singing hit “Love Lockdown.” An eye-popping iTunes debut gives West a No. 3 entrance on the big chart, the best start for a single in his career. It also gives him a clear shot at scoring his fourth career No. 1 single next week.

And while Kanye’s reveling in the reception his first straight-R&B joint is receiving, he can glance over to the new No. 1 single on Hot Country Songs. There, a guy 11 years his senior is showing chart historians how this whole crossover thing is done.

In this week of financial horrors, created largely by formerly cocksure men, it’s perhaps apropos that a couple of ladies post the most gloat-worthy performances in the upper reaches of Billboard's Hot 100.

That starts at the top, where Pink, a nearly decade-long veteran of the chart wars, scores her first solo No. 1 (and second overall), “So What.” And she does it with the largest one-week digital sales total we’ve seen since the beginning of summer.

A few rungs down, U.K. chanteuse and Atlantic Records guinea pig Estelle stages a massive comeback. Her return to iTunes fuels a 44-space move by her Kanye West–supported single “American Boy,” to a new peak of No. 9. Not a moment too soon: one week before the official start of fall in the United States, and a month after it appeared to have peaked at No. 11, our runner-up in the Idolator 2008 Summer Jam competition is finally an official U.S. Top 10 hit. Revenge is sweet.

Reading the New York Times obituary of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright yesterday, I came upon a statistic that the newspaper ran unquestioningly that ticked me off, as it always does when I see similar statements in print:

Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, “The Wall,” eventually sold 23 million copies in the United States.

No, it didn't, I grumbled to myself. It's a double-album—by RIAA math, that means it sold about 11.5 million. SNARL!

There are many things wrong with the Recording Industry Association of America’s system for certifying albums gold, platinum, multiplatinum, and (now) diamond. There’s the counting of records shipped, not sold; I’ve seen discs certified platinum that have actually SoundScanned fewer than 700,000 copies. On the other side of the ledger, there are discs that are under-certified because of the RIAA’s outmoded system requiring labels to request certification—short-changing dozens of classic Motown artists, for example.

But nothing in the RIAA metals methodology sticks in my craw more than double-counting. It’s the biggest scam in record-industry self-tallying, and the main reason it’s infuriating is the very example cited above: journalists and music fans the world over use the RIAA’s certs as their yardstick for all-time album sales. It’s basically a total distortion of rock history.

Baseball is such a rich sport for data geeks, what with every move made by a player having a number attached to it. But the inconsistencies and outright mistakes in the sport's long history, from the number of games in a season to the exclusion of the Negro Leagues, make the sport even moregeek-friendly—those missteps become something else to debate, at least when fans aren't mulling the current statistical effects of controlled substances.

Mistakes and inconsistencies are two of many things baseball geekery and music-chart geekery have in common. (Lord knows the music business has its substances.) Billboard has changed the rules behind the Hot 100 often enough to keep guys like me talking for days on end.

From flip-flopping rules about B-sides, to shifting radio genres, to the belated inclusion of album cuts on the singles charts, chronicling chart history means making allowances for a slew of discrepancies. The biggest discrepancy of all is the 1991 shift in the charts wrought by SoundScan, a B.C.-A.D. moment that makes comparing old and new hits an exercise in near-futility.

You need to keep this top-of-mind when you take in the so-called All-Time Hot 100, released by Billboard this week as part of its celebration of the chart's 50th anniversary. The final result, led by Chubby Checker's "The Twist" and Santana and Rob Thomas' "Smooth," is less interesting than the contortions the magazine went through to put them there.

Last fall and winter, chart fans noted the return to the radio of a style that, until recently, was pretty unfashionable on Billboard's Hot 100: pure-pop female singer-songwriters.

Strummier and sunnier than their Lilith counterparts in the '90s and closer in kinship to California's post-Joni ladies of the '70s, two gals with hard-to-spell names led this '07 boomlet with a pair of Top Five smashes: Colbie Caillat, with "Bubbly," and Sara Bareilles, with "Love Song." The surprise success of American Idol's Brooke White, who seemed every week to be channeling Carole King, only fueled the theory.

Trouble is, neither Caillat nor Bareilles has had an easy time following up those easy-listening hits. Caillat has fared respectably, with a No. 20 followup ("Realize"), but not spectacularly. And Bareilles is completely stalled, with "Love Song" still leading the Adult Contemporary chart but no followup—on the Hot 100, or anywhere—all these months later.

So, new theory: maybe pop fans weren't latching onto these ladies' earthy-girl personas at all, but their sound.

Which brings us to Jason Mraz. He makes a big move into the Top 10 this week and, just in time for fall, proves the bedroom-girlypop sound can still hit big in 2008, even if the act in question possesses an extra Y chromosome.

Atlanta hip-hop king T.I. vaults 70 places into the No. 1 spot on Billboard's Hot 100 this week with "Whatever You Like," a sing-songy, smudgy Xerox of his classic 2006 hit "What You Know."

With this move, Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. scores his first No. 1 as a lead artist (he was credited two years ago on Justin Timberlake's chart-topper "My Love") and sets a new Hot 100 record for biggest leap to the top spot. T.I. takes the record away from Maroon 5, who set it just 16 months ago when "Makes Me Wonder" leapt from No. 64 to No. 1 in a single bound. They, in turn, had stolen the record from Kelly Clarkson, whose only No. 1 hit, "A Moment Like This," held the record for about four years, after she leapt from No. 52 to the top in 2002.

Before Clarkson, this record was held for 28 years, by the Beatles' "Can't Buy Me Love" (No. 26-No. 1 in 1964). The fact that a record held for three decades has been broken thrice in the last six years says less about these songs' popularity and more about the quirks of the modern charts and the sometimes dysfunctional relationship between sales and airplay.

And it means T.I. shouldn't gloat for too long—this record's likely to be broken again.

Last Friday, one of the regular commenters on my "100 and Single" column poured cold water all over my prediction that Estelle's "American Boy" might finally creep into the U.S. Top 10. Noted regular reader ukidol, "Estelle's song has been removed from iTunes since the start of the week, so she'll drop sharply in the next chart. Think they're hoping for a Kid Rock-style album boost."

We won't find out how Estelle fared until the new Hot 100 appears later today, but yesterday's release of SoundScan figures bears out ukidol's prediction. "American Boy," which the prior week was the sixth-best selling digital song in the country, fell to 64th, as its sales took a 78% tumble from 86,700 copies to 19,100 copies. (Presumably, virtually all of those 19,100 copies sold in the first day or two of the tracking week before the song got pulled from iTunes.)

As of last week, "American Boy" was at No. 11 on the big chart. While the radio half of the Hot 100's sales-plus-airplay formulation might keep the song from falling out of the Top 40, no amount of radio growth will keep it from dropping at least a double-digit number of slots—if not this week, then the next.

During the two weeks I was vacationing, Billboard reported changes atop all three of its flagship charts—including the blessed end of Katy Perry's No. 1 reign on the Hot 100, which was displaced by a Rihanna song I like a lot. Even more amazingly, a song that may be the most left-field hit of the decade—"Paper Planes" by M.I.A.—soared into the Top Five.

Now that I'm back, the M.I.A. song is down a bit, and the biggest news on the charts is the post-American Idol debut by tween-and-grandma fave David Archuleta.

It's a cruel business, this chart-column writing.

Nonetheless, the good news, for those of us who rooted against the stage-managed moppet during Idol's last season, is that Archie's losing out on the Hot 100's top slot—by a whisker—to Rihanna. Meanwhile, there's change on top of two other charts, including the deadly static Modern Rock list. Let's catch up, shall we?

When this column debuted on Idolator, I briefly referred to the Hot 100, Billboard's premier singles chart, as "the Dow Jones of pop."

As quippy as that might have sounded, I wasn't kidding. Like the Dow Jones Industrial Average—which signifies the health of the U.S. economy for millions of people who understand little about what the Dow means or how it works—the Hot 100 has been around long enough to become both a fixture and a shorthand for the current state of U.S. popular music.

The Hot 100 is exactly 50 years old this week. The first No. 1 song on the chart Billboard launched the first week of August, 1958, was Ricky Nelson's "Poor Little Fool," an ode to a teasing girl and her bedeviling kiss. It's a considerably politer—if more spiteful—song than the current chart-topper, which tackles a similar topic.

I've been following the Hot 100 avidly for about half of its 50 years, from the first time I heard Casey Kasem on the radio. So before I go on a two-week vacation and put "100 & Single" on a brief hiatus, I hope you'll indulge me as I tackle why I think the Hot 100 matters—even as the industry it was invented to track comes crashing down around it.

For more than three years now, Interscope has tried a range of well-worn tactics to make singer/rapper/agitprop icon M.I.A. a best-seller in America: single releases with high-profile remixes; ads proclaiming her across-the-board rock-critic and blogger love; mixtape tracks; eye-catching and at times controversial music videos; and teaming her up with Timbaland for what turned out to be the weakest track on her latest album, Kala.

This week, seemingly out of nowhere and thanks to none of the above efforts, M.I.A. has her first hit on Billboard's Hot 100, "Paper Planes," which makes its debut all the way up at No. 55.

M.I.A. can credit the House Of Apatow for her sudden chart fortunes, as trailers and ads for the forthcoming Seth Rogen/James Franco stoner comedy Pineapple Express prominently feature the track.

I think M.I.A. fans knew last summer that this song was destined to become her crossover hit, and if it goes no further than this, it will have already fulfilled its destiny. Except it's going to do better because, somewhat improbably, M.I.A. is apparently connecting with one of the most loyal music-buying audiences in history: stoners.

The singles charts have settled into what we hope will be a momentary midsummer slumber. And that starts with the song in its fourth week at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100.

Idolator's distaste for Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" is well-documented, but I nonetheless have to acknowledge that this blandly titillating dance-pop smash is emerging as the nation's song of this summer, its chart run perfectly timed for the season of moist, exposed flesh.

Perry seems likely to hold the keys to the penthouse for a few more weeks, unless Rihanna's "Take a Bow" regains its bullet at No. 2, or Chris Brown's gradually rising, more enjoyably summery "Forever" (up two slots to No. 4 this week) experiences a left-field surge. Otherwise, it's a wasteland out there.

For those of us seeking good news, however, the simultaneous Top 10 entry of three cool songs on three different flagship Billboard charts—Hot 100, R&B/Hip-Hop, and Country—provide a small dose of encouragement.

A front-line act with a months-old album decides to push his most obvious hit-bound song to radio—a song heavily reliant on a prominent sample of a deathless pop hit. But, bucking the day's prevalent trend, he decides not to release the song on the most popular singles medium, forcing most customers to buy his album.

It's a risky move, because the Billboard Hot 100 is dominated by songs that scale the chart by amassing sales as well as airplay. But the song is so mindlessly catchy, the act's people figure it'll be a big chart hit anyway with radio alone.

I could be talking about M.C. Hammer's 1990 smash "U Can't Touch This," the "Superfreak"-sampling hit that made the Top 10, even as Capitol refused to issue it as a cassingle.

But I could also be talking about Kid Rock's "All Summer Long," a mashup of Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London" and Lynyrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" that debuts on the Hot 100 this week at No. 80 despite his lack of interest in releasing it digitally.

Can the erstwhile Robert Richie pull off in 2008 what one Stanley Kirk Burrell pulled 18 years ago?

Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:

If you're trying to guess what might end up as Billboard's top song of 2008, you might take a gander at this week's Hot 100, where a prime contender is still sitting in the top three after peaking months ago.

That would be Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love," the neo-diva ballad that's outlasted anything her role model Mariah Carey has released so far this year. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which released its (mostly dismal) midyear report this week, Lewis' smash is the top-selling single for the six-month period beginning Dec. 31 and ending June 29.

That doesn't necessarily make the Lewis track a lock for the year's top prize, due to some technicalities which I'll discuss momentarily. But there is one thing that makes "Bleeding Love" emblematic of 2008: it's an undeniable smash single which has proven tough for the artist to follow up.

Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:

In the last two years, we've seen several impressive feats on Billboard's Hot 100 by Disney Channel-groomed pop acts, and this week, we see another.

Four songs from the Jonas Brothers vehicle Camp Rock, which premiered on the channel last week, debut within the Top 40. And separately, Miley Cyrus previews her first album unattached from the Hannah Montana brand—and quickly scores her second-ever Top 10 hit.

Dig below these impressive numbers, and it becomes apparent that this is not necessarily another short-lived High School Musical-style chart blip. One week into summer, teenpop may be launching one of its once-a-decade all-out assaults on the pop charts—the kind of siege that will make even you, person over 18, forcibly aware of these songs faster than you can say "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)."

Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:

EMI is the Bear Stearns of the music industry—once mighty, now declining rapidly and ripe for takeover and obliteration. But you'd never know it looking at the new Billboard Hot 100: two singles on EMI's U.S. flagship label, the 66-year-old Capitol Records, sit in the top two positions.

The chart is crowned by Coldplay's "Viva la Vida," the band's first-ever chart-topper and arguably the first No. 1 hit fueled entirely by Apple Inc. One lip-smack below them is Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl," which reaches No. 2—the latest leap in an inexorable march that will probably put her atop the chart before you fire up your July 4 barbecue.

Whether Perry ousts Chris Martin & co. from the penthouse next week or the week after will depend on the public's buying behavior this week, following the release of Coldplay's new blockbuster album. The interplay of song sales and album sales in the iTunes era is hard to predict—as shown by Lil Wayne's drop from No. 1, which we called wrong in a major way just last week.