Chris Molanphy wrote more than two hundred record reviews for CMJ New Music Monthly between 1993 and 2004, covering rock, pop, hip-hop, punk, electronica, R&B, and jazz, with cover stories on Belly and Guided by Voices. He also wrote the magazine's featured column on the pop charts, an unfashionable assignment for a critic in a decade when rock criticism was the norm.
In April 2007, he launched a weekly column called "100 & Single" at the music blog Idolator, combining Billboard research with the judgment of a critic. He relaunched it at the Village Voice in 2011, and by February 2013 he was writing for Slate, where his series "Why Is This Song No. 1?" has run since that December. He named the beat he had built for himself, chart analyst and pop critic, and the title now follows him when he gets called to appear on radio and television programs to comment on breaking chart stories.
Hit Parade, his podcast of pop chart history, began at Slate in April 2017 and reached the top of the Apple Podcasts music chart the following August, the same year the Guardian named it one of the fifty best podcasts. Duke University Press approached him about writing a volume on Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" for its Singles series, a hit that carried his whole argument about how genre, race, and commerce decide what counts as a hit.
Lawrence Peryer recently hosted Chris Molanphy on The Tonearm Podcast, and the two discussed the intricacies of the Billboard Hot 100 and how it reflects the music business as a whole. Molanphy also talks about the loopholes in the charts exploited by record labels, the question of whether the monoculture is actually gone, and the cultural logic that decides who country radio lets through. You can listen to the entire conversation in the audio player embedded below.
Lawrence Peryer: It seems like over the last six months, the artist deep dives you've done on Hit Parade have been preoccupied with artists who are renowned for mutability or reinvention. Was that intentional on your part?
Chris Molanphy: Interesting. I'm thinking of the last six months. Bowie is the obvious example. Billy Idol . . . yes, mutability.
You know what makes a great Hit Parade subject? This would even apply to one I did in February, when I compared the careers of John Denver and Olivia Newton-John, which shouldn't have worked. I love an artist who defies genre or cultural expectations. That's what I'm especially turned on by. I love the fact that you look at someone like Olivia Newton-John's career and people forget that she was a country star. When she died a couple of years ago, everybody was posting still shots of her in Grease or "Physical." If her career had ended in 1977, she would have been remembered as a big country star.
Any artist who defies convention and proves that hitmaking can come in any guise—that's a big turn-on for me. That, to me, is a Hit Parade topic.
Lawrence: So it's not even just necessarily the genre hopping. It's being successful while doing it.
Chris: I call Hit Parade a podcast of pop chart history. The artists in question need to have made some kind of dent on the charts. It's not that I am a hater of indie rock or the left field. My favorite band of the twenty-first century is LCD Soundsystem, and LCD Soundsystem have had scarcely any hits at all, and I say that with great love and respect. But generally, I'm looking for chart impact for a subject for Hit Parade.
As I often say, the charts don't mean everything, but they don't mean nothing. They give you a window into how artists are received by the public, and some of the apocryphal stories about rock and roll and pop music revolve, to some degree, around the charts. You know the famous story that 30,000 people bought the Velvet Underground's first album, but all of them formed a band. The reason people use that very specific number is that Lou Reed told it to Brian Eno, reportedly, and he was checking his charts and royalty statements when he came up with that number.
Lawrence: Never a good indicator of what's actually sold, the royalty statement.
Chris: Certainly not the royalty statement, that's for damn sure. But I think that The Velvet Underground & Nico peaked at, I don't know, 195 or something like that. Yet it's a totemic album.
Lawrence: Bowie is an interesting one as it relates to the stories the charts do and do not tell. It's reached something of a truism, especially within the business, that David was always bigger outside of America than in America. You are primarily concerned with American charts.
Chris: Yes, because it's what I know. It's an American show. I have to start somewhere. But primarily I am focused on the American charts, and most specifically the Billboard charts, because they are the Bible of charts. And the Hot 100 in particular is still, to this day, for all its flaws—and it has many—the best-formulated chart: the way it averages different kinds of consumption into one chart to rule them all, as I like to call it.
Lawrence: When you say that, I hear that as a real earnest attempt to get proximate to what's going on in the world, right? It's a construct that's meant to reflect reality.
Chris: It's absolutely a construct. One of the reasons the Hot 100 has lasted nearly seven decades is that it's adaptable. It does not work exactly the same way it worked in 1958. On the other hand, very broadly speaking, its rules attempt to balance different forms of consumption. The Hot 100 has always included at least two pools of data, primarily sales of songs and radio airplay, and I call those two forms of consumption active fandom and passive fandom.
That, to me, is why the Hot 100 works, because radio is a very passive medium. You're leaning back, or you're sitting in your car and letting somebody throw music at you, and the radio stations have researched the crap out of the songs they play because they know what's going to make you stay on the station and what's going to make you change the station. That is one form of consumption.
The other form of consumption is when you actually go in and pick the song and say, "I want to buy that song," or "I want to stream that song." Those two forms of consumption, if you average them out, give you a pretty good read of what's most popular in America in any given week.
The other thing I say about the charts is that they only tell you what's popular one week at a time, which may sound obvious, but I think people think that the peak a song reaches is its stamp for all time. And there are so many hits that miss the top 10, the Top 40, the Hot 100 entirely, that are now legendary. I did a whole episode about them called "Legacy Hits." The one I love to point to is "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John. Peaked at number 41. Was never counted down by Casey Kasem. Not a Top 40 hit. And yet, if I asked you to give me Elton John's five most definitive hits, you're probably going to name "Tiny Dancer."
Lawrence: It's stunning to hear that because it had never occurred to me the role that Almost Famous played in that song's retro-iconic status. In this world of so many sync placements, so much media that needs music, these songs can just drop out of the sky randomly.
Chris: Like what Stranger Things did for Kate Bush a couple of years ago. That went from a number 30 hit—her only American Top 40 hit, by the way—to a number three hit. That's insane. And it's not as if this didn't happen prior to the digitization of the charts, but the digital era just accelerates it. Because of the way the Fourth of July fell this year—it was a Saturday, which means it appeared at the end of a tracking week—songs that were America-themed did better on the charts than they ever had before. Toby Keith now has a new biggest pop hit of all time, because his "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" came back to number 11 in the year 2026. So you can't make this stuff up.
Lawrence: In your now multiple-decade chart analyst view, what are some meta or high-level learnings you can draw about the charts over time? And how do you think about payola?
Chris: Corruption has always been part of the music business. There's low-level corruption and high-level corruption. I consider the high-level corruption really more the stuff that went on decades ago, the early days of payola, or the way certain artists, many of them Black artists, were robbed of their royalties. If you read Fredric Dannen's book Hit Men, it'll make your toes curl, some of the stories he tells about the involvement of organized crime in the music business.
To this day, if the music business can find a loophole in the chart rules, they will use it. One of the things I wrote about was the practice that became rampant in the 2010s of bundling albums with tickets and eventually merchandise. It became a real plague on the charts, with things going to number one that weren't about the album at all; they were about a sale of an album tied to a ticket promotion. It started innocently enough with a Prince album back in 2004, where Prince on his Musicology tour was giving away copies of the Musicology CD, and somehow his people talked Billboard into counting that for the charts.
Almost immediately, Billboard came to regret it, because the CDs were being given away for free. Billboard said, "At the very least, we've got to have a rule where you have the option not to have the CD, and it's got to cost you something." They kept tweaking the rules to try and make it more quote-unquote honest. But the business kept driving Mack trucks through the loopholes and finding ways to make the option so invisible that it barely even qualified, such that eventually, by around 2020, Billboard all but shut down the bundling entirely.
That was legal. That's a point I often make to people about the charts—your eyes should pop at what's legal, not what's illegal, not money and cocaine being slipped under the table. A lot of what qualifies as radio payola nowadays involves horse trading of, "Oh, if you play our record more, we'll give you this artist for your Jingle Ball concert," or stuff like that.
As we get better data, we learn more about human nature and about how popularity functions. Everybody divides chart history into before SoundScan and after SoundScan. For those who don't know, SoundScan is the technology that was employed on the charts starting in 1991, where Billboard for the first time had actual sales counts of records being sold, thanks to barcode scanners at record stores—the thing you use at the supermarket or the drugstore. That was hot new technology in 1991. For the first time, the charts were really accurate, because Billboard was actually getting a piece count of how many copies that Mariah Carey CD sold in any given week.
The fault in the charts prior to this was less about corruption. It was more about a lack of data. For example, one story I often tell is that in 1989 the rapper Tone Lōc should have had a number one hit with "Wild Thing." Certain radio stations thought the song was too ribald or raw, and it only got to number five on the radio side of the Hot 100 formula. But on the sales side, not only was "Wild Thing" a number one record, it was number one by like a factor of three to five. It was outselling everything in the top 20.
If Billboard had accurate piece counts in 1989, regardless of how much airplay "Wild Thing" got, those awesome sales numbers would have made it probably a two-month number one hit. But because we didn't have the data, it goes down in history as a number two hit, behind "Like a Prayer" by Madonna. So better data changes our perceptions of what hits are.
Lawrence: Since the charts have been even more data-informed, are there other surprises, or myths and folklore that we've been disabused of?
Chris: This is now going back decades, but one thing we discovered once the charts got computerized in 1991 with the SoundScan system is that albums open like movies. We used to think that an album would debut somewhere in the middle of the chart and rise to number one. That's not what happens. Think about the movie box office, right? When The Odyssey opens, it doesn't start at number 10 and climb to number one. It's a blockbuster. It opens at number one.
One other thing we've learned in the streaming era is that the charts have gotten a lot slower. That may sound counterintuitive. You would think streaming data would make the charts more rapid, but in fact, once a song catches on with the public, they'll just keep streaming it for months, longer than anybody would have guessed. "Choosin' Texas" by country star Ella Langley is now in its fourteenth week at number one, mostly because people really love that song.
Lawrence: At what point do you think the charts started to reflect the media fragmentation that we've all come to accept as a truism? You mentioned Ella Langley. Now granted, let's factor me in for age. I've never heard the song that I'm aware of, and that's a fourteen-week number one. I don't think I would have been able to avoid a number one twenty or thirty years ago, even if I wanted to.
Chris: I think the monoculture lasted through about the 1980s. I think we all have this vision that when we were teenagers or twentysomethings, everybody knew all the big hits, and now nobody does. And I'm no better. I knew the hits of the eighties better than I knew the hits of the two thousands or 2010s.
But I will say that I started to notice atomization of culture by the nineties. Again, right around when charts got more accurate thanks to SoundScan, you started to see that you had the gangster rap fans and the pure pop fans and the grunge fans, and ne'er the twain shall meet. There was some crossover, but folks lived in their own little pockets. That's only accelerated every decade since then.
On the other hand, every Christmas when "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" by Brenda Lee and "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey go back to number one, suddenly we're a monocultural country again. So it waxes and wanes. But I feel like we've been atomizing for some time now.
In the case of Ella Langley in particular—country music is an interesting example. If we were having this conversation in, I don't know, Arkansas, that's the aural wallpaper that surrounds everybody. If I ask the average person in New York City to name five George Strait songs, I bet they couldn't even get to three.
Country music has been its own world for a long time. The reason we're seeing more country songs on the Hot 100 is that we now have better data, and country fans, who were the last to adopt streaming services, are now on Spotify like the rest of us. She may mean nothing to somebody on the coasts, but in the middle of the country, Ella Langley is a megastar. We now have the data to show that.
Lawrence: When you did episode 100, and you talked about your own life with the charts, there was so much in your story that resonated for me. Listening to Casey Kasem as a kid—Sunday morning to me was listening to the Top 40. But you called Casey Kasem the original poptimist.
Chris: I was being a bit glib when I called Casey Kasem the original poptimist. What I meant was, to the extent Casey cared about the songs he counted down, he understood that all different kinds of music should bump up against each other. That's what made for great radio and great entertainment. In the eighties you could hear Van Halen's "Jump" back to back with "When Doves Cry" by Prince. There was a little more variety and a little less narrowcasting.
When you were asking me before, when did we all atomize—one thing that happened in the nineties was that radio in particular got demographically focused, such that, "Oh, we're only focused on twenty-five- to thirty-nine-year-old females," or whatever.
What made Casey's American Top 40 cool was that they were playing all forty records at the top of the Hot 100, regardless of their genre. And frankly, they got pushback from the radio stations that were running the show. Can we have a version of the show that doesn't play the country music? They finally caved. Rap forced the issue. By the end of the eighties, the idea of Casey Kasem counting down "Me So Horny" by 2 Live Crew was unthinkable to the producers of American Top 40. To some degree, it was demographically destined to not last forever. This is why we can't have nice things.
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Lawrence: It's also interesting the way modern music has seeped its way now into country, whether it's the power ballad or hard rock or dance and hip hop.
Chris: Morgan Wallen uses trap beats on probably half of his hits. The same beats that are powering a song by Future are powering hits by folks like Morgan Wallen. Jason Aldean was rapping on a number one country hit back in 2010. These tools are available to everybody.
And I love the fact that our most imperial star, Taylor Swift, started out in country music, because she determined this is the medium that's going to let me be a singer-songwriter and have hits. She leveraged that for a few years, and then she felt, "You know what, I think I want to make pop music." But she just scored a number one hit this summer that is getting played on country radio again, this song from Toy Story 5.
Lawrence: It's interesting about that hit, because it seems like once you leave country, it's hard to get back. Country radio is pretty good about keeping out people once they turn their back on them, and it's amazing that she's gotten that hit on that chart.
Chris: I write a series for Slate called "Why Is This Song Number One?" When that song, "I Knew It, I Knew You," reached number one, I wrote about not only the fact that it was number one on the pop chart—that wasn't all that interesting; anything Taylor Swift releases, she's going to get a number one hit out of it—but the fact that it was embraced by country radio so rapidly. That is unusual, because you're right, country radio gatekeeps more than most genres, and it's cultural as much as it is musical. If they believe that you are not one of us, they won't play it, and they are very wary of carpetbaggers. Whether it's Jewel trying to have a country hit, or Bon Jovi trying to have a country hit, they are very selective over who they'll let over the fence, so to speak.
I did a book a few years ago about "Old Town Road," Lil Nas X's song. I realized that "Old Town Road" was a perfect prism to talk about the history of charts, the history of genre, the history of race and genre. What happened to "Old Town Road" in 2019 —where it was briefly on the country charts, then folks in Nashville complained, and Billboard yanked it from the country charts—is the Nashville industrial complex in full effect. They are very wary of people poking fun at them, not being true adherents to the genre. They were very skeptical of Beyoncé trying country music. And of course race is a factor as well.
Lawrence: Chart analyst, pop critic—are you the first one? And if not, is there a lineage you see yourself within?
Chris: I'm laughing, because I often say it's a title I made up, and it's not as if I have no predecessors at all. It's more that joint beat, chart analyst, and pop critic—the way I phrase it—that's what is bespoke.
I've been writing about music in some form or another since high school. My love of the charts was the love that dare not speak its name. It was not considered cool to be as into Billboard and as into the charts as I was. What I often say about my beat is that a couple of things had to get invented for it to make sense in the twenty-first century. Blogging had to be invented, because it aggregated niche interests in a way that the internet revealed that people actually care about stuff that you think is niche and nerdy and weird. Podcasting had to be invented.
So I started hanging around a music blog from the Gawker empire, back when Gawker was an empire, called Idolator. They noticed that I wrote fairly authoritatively about the charts, and they finally said to me, "Would you like to do some guest posts for us?" And eventually I said to them, "Hey, listen, if I wrote about the charts every week, would you pay for that?" And so they paid me to write a column that I called "100 & Single."
And what occurred to me at that time was that you had these music critics, rock critics, pop critics—these people were very important to me. I started reading Rolling Stone in the eighties, just like most teenagers. And they would occasionally talk about the charts, but only as a sideline. But they wrote like critics.
Then you had the people who wrote about the charts, whether it's the people who actually wrote for Billboard, or Fred Bronson, the guy who wrote The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, or Paul Grein, who wrote the original "Chart Beat" column in Billboard. They did phenomenal research. But they didn't really try to write like critics.
It occurred to me that if you could analyze the charts like somebody who wrote for Billboard, but you wrote like a critic, with a little bit of wit and snark and piercing cultural analysis, that was new. Nobody was doing that. And so I made up this beat. To this day, when All Things Considered on NPR or some newspaper needs somebody who understands how the charts work but can talk about them like a critic, they tend to call me, which is nice. It's a beat that I made up.
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