December 2, 2013

Singer Gordon accused of manipulating Top 40 list

Filed under: Music,Online by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

One of the authoritative hit parades of the country has accused artists such as Gordon and record companies of manipulating their positions by buying their own products, according to the chairman of the Dutch Top 40 foundation, Erik de Zwart.

Who’s Gordon? He’s the culturally insensitive talent show jury member who fired off ‘racist’ Chinese jokes on live television recently that in the end were indeed insulting to the Chinese candidate.

When determining the Top 40 airplay is also taken into account, contrary to another well established hit parade, the Single Top 100, making it susceptible to manipulation, De Zwart says. Gordon comes in at 38, 27, or not at all on major radio station lists. De Zwart believes that it doesn’t jive that Gordon is at Number 1 for weeks on the Single Top 100. Gordon’s response was that De Zwart was envious of him and trying to ruin his good name.

(Links: radio.nl-1, radio.nl-2)

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April 25, 2008

“Number 1 hit costs 5000 euro”

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 8:38 pm

Singer/politician Henk Westbroek told daily De Pers (The Press) that it takes about 5000 euro to engineer a Top 40 hit. For this money a mysterious “team” called De Hitmakers will strategically buy songs at different stores both on- and off-line. Since less and less singles are being sold in the Netherlands, it takes less and less sales to top the charts. According to De Pers it takes as little as 500 downloads. GfK, owner of amongst other the 3FM Mega Top 50, tries to right things when it suspects manipulation by removing entries from the list or lowering them, but this has led to protests from genuine pop artists.

Perhaps the Dutch market is getting too small for hit parades, unless other methods of counting are introduced. But the country is probably still big enough to act as an international seed market for pop songs, where artists can attract international attention by scoring a hit. Not that I would like to suggest that budding pop artists from abroad start employing De Hitmakers’ services. That would be … immoral!

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March 8, 2008

TMF cancels plan to list all downloads in its hit parade

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 2:09 pm

TV music channel TMF (The Music Factory, owned by MTV) recently announced plans to include all downloads in the computation of its new hit parade called Superchart, both from legal and illegal sources. This week the station cancelled those plans, according to NRC (Dutch). Counting paid downloads in hit parades is a relatively new phenomenon. Two years ago, in April 2006, Gnarls Barkeley were the first act to top a major (UK) hit parade on the strength of downloads.

NRC lists no reason why TMF would change the format of their chart at the last minute, other than that the station considers downloading from an illegal source to be “wrong”. NVPI, Dutch representatives of the record industry, applaud TMF’s decision. “You are sending a fatal message if you count all downloads for your hit parades,” Wouter Rutten said. “It would be as if the music industry had accepted downloads from an illegal source.” Oh my.

(Why the unwieldy “downloads from an illegal source”? Because the Netherlands, like Canada and a few other countries, allow copies for private use. The phrase “illegal downloads”, recently gaining popularity in the Netherlands, may be snappier but is also incorrect.)

Via Dagelinks (Dutch).

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