Finding the Rhythm

A blog reader named Mykael posted a comment to my most recent chart entry (thank you, by the way) and pointed out that my remark about Donna Summer’s I’m a Fire seems at odds with what’s happening in the greater chart universe, and in particular, with Billboard. There’s two responses I have to that, and I’ll save one of them for a later blog article I’m working on. But one I’d like to talk about one of them now.

Virtually every professional DJ receives promotional copies of music. There are a lot of ways that happens, and broadly speaking, the higher your stature in the industry, the more likely you are to receive promos, and the less you’re likely to pay for them (if you pay anything at all). For someone like myself, I subscribe to (and pay for) three different promotional distribution services for DJs, and I receive a large portion of my music that way. (I also buy a lot of it the same way any consumer does.) A lot of DJs I know, especially those work in Second Life, can’t be inconvenienced by actually paying for music, so they use Limewire, but I’ve already spoken about that enough I suspect.

In any case, what tracks get sent through promotional channels to DJs and through which channels is entirely up to the record labels (or the artists for most indie releases). Some labels, like Robbins, my own affiliate label CAPP, and even Warner, Sony BMG, and Universal all go out of their way to service most of their releases to DJs through any and all available channels under the belief that the more play the song gets, and the more grass roots support it gets, the better. Others (I’ll refrain from naming names here) make sure the leading DJs in the country get their product, and use maybe one or two of the usual channels, viewing the rest as customers—not a promotional vehicle. So, a DJ like me is unlikely to ever get anything as a promo in this case, and if I do, it’s usually a single mix of a single track, weeks or even months after its initial release.

I should mention that the labels do this differently with different artists and songs, by the way. For example, not every song a label puts out will get promoted the same way. What accounts for the difference I don’t know.

In any case, like any DJ, I don’t play music I don’t have, and I don’t have music I haven’t heard about. And with the approaches I just mentioned, and in light of the fact that I don’t steal music, one of three things happens:

• I get a track way before the general public starts hearing it or it starts charting. (Rarely)
• I get a track about the same time as everyone else. (Often)
• I get a track weeks after it already appears on radio, Billboard charts, etc. (Frequently)

Mykael, in the case of the Donna Summer track, her record label, Sony BMG, serviced I’m a Fire to DJs several weeks ago. I fell in love with the track immediately, and played the hell out of it. I am, in fact, personally a bit tired of hearing it. But now, weeks after I got it, it finally starts to chart on Billboard, although I still haven’t heard it on dance radio yet. And I fully expect that now, since it’s getting broader coverage, I’ll start getting requests for it during my sets, and it’ll likely start to rise in my chart again as a result. (I’m predicting here.)

I find this pretty strange, because it’s the exact opposite of what normally happens, especially with an artist with the stature of Donna Summer. I would have expected that her record label went after Billboard reporting DJs with everything they had, and would not have worried about the rest of us until much later on. That is, in fact, what happened with Celine Dion’s most recent single dance remix… It made #1 on
the Billboard dance charts before some of the industry folks I know even heard of the record, and I didn’t get a copy of the track until several weeks after it had already started falling from #1.

Charting is not a science, so the timing of how it unfolds can’t really be predicted. But it’s very strongly driven by promo channels, who the labels choose to go after and when, and, I suppose, how aggressively dance promoters (like Carey Vance, Bobby Shaw, Harry Towers and others) have been engaged to do a hand-to-hand assault on behalf of the label who’s contracting with them.

In any case, as Mykael pointed out, Donna Summer’s track is starting to gain some traction if Billboard is any indication, and even if I did burnout on it early, I’m betting I’ll come back around. This was, as I explained, a surprising anomaly for a DJ at my level in the food chain.

One other comment on this subject that’s particular pertinent to the Donna Summer track is the attention span of DJs (and the public). Some tracks just have better staying power than others, which is a factor of the strength of the production, the songwriting, and to some extent the availability of a range of remixes to keep it fresher, longer. But the other factor here is that new music is coming out all the time, and in the ramp-up to the annual Winter Music Conference, it seems the labels were all working overtime or something. There’s been a ton of new releases, and some of them are really strong. That also tends to make people (me) focus less on last week’s tracks, and more on this week’s tracks.

In any case, thanks again for the comment.