"Harlem Shake" is the #1 song in America thanks to You Tube play

Posted: 2/21/13 at 1:28pm

" This week the Billboard Hot 100, the magazine’s 55-year-old singles chart, takes a evolutionary step by incorporating YouTube plays into its formula. The move comes just in time for Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake,” the latest viral video phenomenon, which will make its debut at No. 1 this week thanks to the change.

“Harlem Shake,” a bass-heavy hip-hop track with no lyrics beyond a few samples, got little mainstream attention when it was released in May as a free download. But this month its popularity exploded on YouTube, as thousands of fans uploaded videos of themselves dancing — some might say simply flailing — along to the song. By last week more than 4,000 videos were going up each day....

“The notion that a song has to sell in order to be a hit feels a little two or three years ago to me,” Mr. Werde said. “The music business today — much to its credit — has started to learn that there are lots of different ways a song can be a hit, and lots of different ways that the business can benefit from it being a hit.”


That last bit makes my head spin: “The notion that a song has to sell in order to be a hit" is exactly the notion Billboard was founded on. It measured a song's popularity by how well it sold (and before that it measured circus and vaudeville acts by how many tickets they sold). Going on You Tube to look at a 30-second "Harlem Shake" video is in no way equivalent to going to Musicland to buy a 45- or even downloading an MP3.

It's almost as if they started to rank movie grosses by how many times people watched the trailer.
NY Times

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 2/21/13 at 3:53pm

Harlem Residents React to the Harlem Shake

[zepka102]

Posted: 2/21/13 at 8:33pm

It's a sad, sad world.

[trentsketch]

Posted: 2/21/13 at 8:38pm

"“Harlem Shake,” a bass-heavy hip-hop track"

Really NYT? We're going to pretend there's no such thing as dance/electronica now? Is it a hip-hop track because there's spoken word in it?

[Brave Sir Robin2]

Posted: 2/21/13 at 8:53pm

Ugh. That's it. I'm moving to Denmark.