Chart Shifts by Billboard Draw Fire

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Kyle Coroneos, who writes a blog for the Saving Country Music site, said Billboard’s decision to count the airplay a country song gets on other formats is important. This means that traditional country artists, whose songs are played only on country stations, will be pushed down deeper into the charts, while pop-oriented stars, like Ms. Swift or Lady Antebellum, crowd the Top 10. Labels in turn are likely to encourage artists to make country records with a pop flavor, he said.

“It erodes the autonomy of the country charts in general,” he said. “I have a theory all the genres of music are coagulating into one big monogenre and this emphasizes that.”

Kyle Bylin, an analyst for Live Nation Labs, a blog about technology and music, said that the new rules also mean artists who enjoy a high volume of online sales or streams can remain at the top of the charts for longer periods, even after radio programmers have taken their songs out of heavy rotation.

What’s more, the emphasis on streaming and sales of digital tracks makes it easier for an act with a blockbuster album to dominate a genre chart. One example is Mumford & Sons, the folk-rock group from Britain. Their album “Babel” has sold more than 900,000 copies since it was released a month ago, most of them digital, and it has also broken records for streaming on Spotify.

The first single from the album, “I Will Wait,” has remained in the Top 10 of the rock songs chart all month, mostly on the strength of airplay on alternative rock stations. But when the rule change came, seven more songs from “Babel,” buoyed by streaming on Spotify and digital sales, entered the Top 20 on the rock chart.

At the same time, Fun.’s “Some Nights,” which had been sliding down the chart but was still selling well online, surged back to the No. 1 slot and has stayed there.

Mr. Werde acknowledged that the new rules may make it harder for artists with little cross-genre appeal to get a No. 1 song, but the new rules also provide a “clearer reflection of what’s actually being consumed in the music space.” Modern charts need to take in more than radio to measure a song’s popularity, he said, and Billboard has plans to go further, folding data from YouTube and Vevo into its charts as well.

“A hit doesn’t just look like one thing anymore,” he wrote in a recentcolumn answering critics
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