Reference sites

[koganbot]

Does anyone know if there's a U.S. equivalent for everyhit.com? Allmusic gives the year for chart singles but not the month they peaked (and it's hard interpreting what their year designation means anyway: year it enters or year it peaks?). The reason I'm interested is that the quartet of singles that altered U.S. teenpop - "Everywhere," "Don't Let Me Get Me," "A Thousand Miles," and "Complicated" - in 2001 and 2002 seem to have hit later in Britain than in the U.S., but I'm not sure how much later. "Everywhere" doesn't peak in Britain until April 2002 (at a relatively low 18), whereas its U.S. peak is sometime in late summer or fall of '01 (Wiki gives release date of July 24 but no peak date); "Don't Let Me Get Me" hits number 6 in the UK in May 2002, probably only a couple of months after its U.S. date; "A Thousand Miles" gets to number 6 in August 2002 (my memory says February or March for the U.S. [Wiki says Feb for the release date], but of course that's not at all trustworthy), "Complicated" is number 3 in October 2002 (memory says May or June for U.S., same caveat).

I'm curious because Tom just linked this old NYLPM post from June 2002 (Is Pop Cool?), so I was looking at dates and seeing that what he was hearing as teenpop was already being superseded in the U.S., but in Britain he wasn't likely to be hearing the supersession yet - and anyway I don't know if the supersession ever really happened in Britain (unless you want to call the later retro-quirky singer-songwriter and/or quasi-soul crop of Tashbed-Amy-Duffy "teenpop" and say its ascendance marks a British equivalent to the American shift)(Bedingfield's "Unwritten" did very well on Radio Disney, by the way, but I still don't think she registers as teenpop; Nelly Furtado's "I'm Like A Bird" got on Disney at the same time or earlier than "Everywhere," for that matter, so could make my quartet a quintet except I don't think Furtado was registering as teenpop either, though maybe she was influencing it).

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Think you're giving me too much credit actually - what now looks like transformation was parsed by me as clumsy attempts to grow the form up. Tho I really liked A Thousand Miles at the time.

[koganbot]

Don't fret, I wasn't getting it as a teenpop transformation either, in that I thought of the Pink track more as a transformation in Pink (that nine-year-olds happened to be listening to) than as a transformation in teenpop (and my favorite on Missundaztood is "Dear Diary" which didn't get nearly enough votes in the poptimists poll). And I underrated the Avril and barely noticed the Carlton and I first heard "Everywhere" on the adult contemporary station and had no idea Branch was a teen so my reaction when I first heard "Everywhere" on Disney was, "Huh, Disney's playing an adult contemporary singer-songwriter; well, they do tend to have breadth in what they play." Then I heard Branch interviewed on Disney and even though she sounded like a young woman I still didn't realize she was a teen and thought "Hmmmm, an AC singer-songwriter thinks its useful to market herself through Disney too." When Naomi told me that Lia was paying attention to Michelle's lyrics and of course to Pink's anti-Britney song (which isn't anti-Britney but that's how a lot of people took "Don't Let Me Get Me") maybe I figured out that something was happening but I thought of it as happening with Lia not necessarily with teenpop in general.

Still think "Everywhere" holds up amazingly well in melody and style, and I never did think the lyrics quite meant anything.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

The revamped Billboard.com actually has a lot of historical data in their "visualizer". You have to type in an artist name (after you "pull out the tab" on the left) and pick the chart you want their activity from from the drop down box. It will then show you a span of time with bars to indicate when it charted and a dot at the top for each charting record. Click on the dot for what you want and it expands to show the chart position each week. Click on a week and it takes you to the top 10 or so for that week.

It looks like the singles go back into the 50's (although you can't get Chubby Checker or other older artists to come up yet) and the albums go back to 1965.

It's a bit of work to get where you want to go, but there really isn't an equivalent out there right now.

[koganbot]

Thanks for explaining all that. I HATED the new Billboard look on first sight, and couldn't (and can't) understand why when you click on "charts" they don't just list all their charts and let you, you know, go to the one you want. As it is, they'll give you a few of the main ones, and to find your way to, say, the adult contemporary chart you first have to go to one of the charts they do give you, click on it, find a song that may also have charted adult contemporary, look at where it says "also charted on," and hope that adult contemporary is one of the top five charts the Billboard decides to list for the song.* Maybe there's an easier way, but if so, it would help if they'd tell us.

But I did also discover that Billboard now lists all the songs on the Hot 100 rather than the Top 50. So that's a plus, and with the gizmos you point out apparently a lot of other info is available that formerly wasn't, or was formerly available only when piggybacked on data from Allmusic. I guess I'll go play there to see what I can see. I mean, it used to be a bitch trying to find when a current song first entered the charts. You'd have to hit search, hit the charts option, then basically guess how many pages you'd have to go to find the week the song first entered, would take many minutes.

*And then they only give you the top 15, reserving the rest for the paying customers.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

I have no idea how I found this (it was buried somewhere on an existing page), but I bookmarked it as soon as I did.

http://www.billboard.com/#/charts

It's the list of all the charts available on-line for free.

I was a little disappointed when they moved things like Adult Top 40 and Triple A to the paid-only, but that was easily offset by the expansion of the singles to the full 100 and albums to the full 200 along with adding things like the Blues and Bluegrass charts. They also seem to have combined some charts as the new Jazz Album Chart is different from the previous weeks in that it seems to have combined the Jazz and Contemporary Jazz listings (which is fine...to many charts anyway).

[koganbot]

Many thanks - is now bookmarked.

[koganbot]

Thanks to brak55 I've now figured out how to wring data out of Billboard, which shows the U.S. and British peaks for those songs coming closer in time than I'd expected.

Michelle Branch "Everywhere" enters the Hot 100 on September 1, 2001 and peaks at 12 on November 12, 2001.

Pink "Don't Let Me Get Me" enters the Hot 100 on March 2, 2002 and peaks at 8 on May 11, 2002, where it holds for another week.

Vanessa Carlton "A Thousand Miles" enters the Hot 100 on March 2, 2002 and peaks at 5 on May 18, 2002, where it holds for another two weeks.

Avril Lavigne "Complicated" enters the Hot 100 on June 1, 2002 and peaks at 2 on August 3, 2002, drops to 3 for a while, and then returns to 2 on September 7.