Carey "gives away" new single and hits no. 1
Mariah Carey’s string of No. 1 singles is unbroken, thanks to a little sleight of hand.
"Heartbreaker" hits No. 1 next week, jumping up from No. 16 the week before. That kind of jump is extremely rare, according to Billboard, which also counts airplay when calculating the top record. But "Heartbreaker" is only No. 11 on their radio chart, and hit that plateau a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that Sony employed two legal "tricks" to get Mariah’s languishing, averagely played record to No. 1. First they released the Carey single on August 24th only for radio play and to MTV - it didn’t really become available for sales until September 14th. The result was like a pressure cooker of built-up expectation.
When "Heartbreaker" finally hit stores on the 14th, sales went through the roof - 270,000 - and it leapfrogged over a bunch of singles that had been working their way up the charts for weeks. It helped that Sony sold "Heartbreaker" in chain stores like Transworld, which supplies records to over 1000 outlets like the Coconuts chain - for only 49 cents. "That’s the equivalent of giving it away," says one record exec - rather than the industry average of $1.99.
"They did the same thing for Ricky Martin’s single 'Livin’ La Vida Loca' and Jennifer Lopez’s 'If You Had My Love,'" charges a major record executive, "creating phony hit singles." A spokesman for Sony insists, "An account or retailer will come to us with a plan and set their own price. There is no deep discounting on our side. 'Heartbreaker' is a hot, hot single."
If the rise of Carey’s single had not been engineered, the No. 1 single this week would have been Santana’s "Smooth," which has sold 402,000 copies and is No. 7 on the airplay chart. It’s been climbing steadily for 11 weeks. Another big hit, "Mambo No. 5," has been held down on the charts because it's only available as a 12-inch single in specialty stores. "Otherwise it would be No. 1," says Alex Vitoulis, who runs Billboard’s retail charts.
Vitoulis says that record companies are going to be holding back singles for sale more and more to get the "jump" effect. This week Jive Records converted R. Kelly’s cut "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time" from radio play to commercially available. It jumped from Number 55 to Number 17 in one week.
Vitoulis also says that the Billboard Top 100 was forced to rethink its methodology because record companies were releasing fewer and fewer singles for sales, choosing instead to use them essentially as radio-played commercials for the more expensive albums they were included on.
"We changed our charts because record companies were not releasing singles to stores, just radio. We told them that this meant they wouldn’t have No. 1 singles, and they didn’t care. So we had to change the charts to reflect big radio hits as well as sales." Vitoulis says the lion’s share of singles that were being released for sale "were all urban, which made the charts look strange."
In other words, Billboard worried that black people buy singles and white people buy albums, thus creating havoc with the way they record their history and archives. The implication is that if they hadn't started counting airplay-only singles by non-rap artists, all those end-of the decade lists would make it seem like rap dominated the record business. But that’s another story. (Fox 411)
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