Guest Post: Stans Play The Game of Charts
For stan-armies, the Billboard Hot 100 is the world's greatest game
Today, I’m excited to share my first ever guest post! Working with another young writer was an exciting experience for me, so if you too are just beginning this work, don’t hesitate to reach out like today’s writer, Kofi, did. You can get me at tobiehess@gmail.com — Tobias
A little about today’s author:
My name is Kofi Mframa and I am a journalism student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Throughout my time here, I’ve written articles for the independent, student-run Commonwealth Times. To stay connected and keep up with my work, you can follow me on Twitter @MframaKofi and on instagram @mmframaa (this is also the username for my personal twitter ...I think I'm quite funny on there.)
If you spend any time in the Twitter replies of pop-culture pulse-checkers such as Pop Crave, Chart Data, or Billboard, you are sure to find a noticeably consistent presence: accounts with popular singers as their profile pictures throwing cryptic jabs at various pop stars in a language all their own.
“Lana tanked”
“Beyonce outsold”
so and so “ended Nicki”
To those unfamiliar with the unique lexicon of stan twitter (for the uninitiated, “stan” is internet slang for super fan), these phrases come off as nonsensical jargon. But these jabs are not just inside-jokes poking fun at certain stans’ musical rivals. They are acts of cultural and narrative battle waged by various fans of major pop phenoms. Stans, undyingly devoted to their favorite artists, have become economic and discursive gamesmen, manipulating algorithms, charts and online discourse to help their idols succeed.
Stan culture is no new phenomenon. From the Beatles to One Direction, popular artists have always had wildly engaged fans that have gone to extremes for a modicum of their idol’s attention. But today, social media provides more avenues for superfans to show their admiration. And because of the faux-intimate relationship that stans share with their favorite artists, stans feel compelled to help them succeed however they can. Every high and low experienced by a popular artist is felt by their audience per the landscape of modern internet standom.
With the rise of Twitter in 2010, everyday culture consumers had, for the first time, a direct line of communication to their “faves,” as well as a decentralized platform to promote their favored artist’s work. To the most dedicated super fans, this became a tool to increase an artist’s cultural influence. For example, stans often tried to coerce Twitter’s algorithm into getting artists on the site’s list of trending topics.
This was especially the case for Justin Bieber. In 2010, the singer took up 3% of Twitter’s traffic. Beliebers would often spam tweet his name just to get him on Twitter’s list of trending topics. All this manufactured attention escalated to the point that Twitter had to adjust its algorithm to one that “identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis…” according to an article by Mashable.
But today, the need for stans to prove (and manifest) the popularity of their favorite artists has shifted from the Twitter trending list to the Billboard Hot 100. And in the streaming era, stans have mastered gaming music consumption to bolster the objects of their adoration.
Let’s look at UK singer Harry Styles’s most recent project, Harry’s House. The album currently sits at number three on the Billboard 200 album charts and had a massive debut selling over 500,000 copies in its first week. The success of this album is due largely to Styles’s massive fanbase. When the album was released, stans made themselves investors in Styles’s career by bulk buying vinyls and CDs, hosting numerous streaming parties, and encouraging each other to keep on streaming the album past the point of enjoyment. It’s hard to tell if Harry’s House would’ve still had such a big debut if it weren’t for Styles’s dedicated stans who made it their mission to get him a #1.
Artists and labels are cognizant of this overconsumptive impulse in stans and often exploit them for chart success. A glaring example is the fanfare surrounding Korean boy group BTS and their song “Dynamite.” It was the groups first song sung entirely in English and upon its release on August 21, 2020, the BTS ARMY hit the ground running to get the group their first #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their dedication paid off when the music video for ‘Dynamite’ became the fastest KPOP music video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube.
In an interesting article dissecting stan culture’s emphasis on Billboard charts, Evan Qiang writes about “Dynamite,”
“‘Dynamite’ had all the ingredients for a smash hit: it was catchy, featured a colorful music video, and was heavily played on radios, and the group went all out to capitalize on this chance. During the song’s tracking week, BTS released remixes, offered discounts, and sold vinyls and cassettes. They relied on their fanbase to purchase, stream, and share as much as possible, and it paid off when the group finally achieved their elusive goal.”
The BTS ARMY had their work cut out for them though when it came to getting the group’s next song, “Butter,” to the top of the charts. They now had to compete with Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” which had also just been released. The ARMY employed all the tools in their arsenal and despite achieving the elusive #1, it was clear that Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” was the more popular song based on the song’s undeniable cultural impact.
Billboard also noticed this discrepancy between observable culture and charting metrics, and in a cover story three months after the song’s release, probed BTS about alleged chart manipulation. When asked about the ARMY’s potentially inorganic methods of buoying the group’s songs, RM, a member of the group, responded, “Slamming us or our fans for getting to No. 1 with physical sales and downloads, I don’t know if that’s right … It just feels like we’re easy targets because we’re a boy band, a K-pop act, and we have this high fan loyalty.” But the incident still prompted questions about the nature of popularity and measuring it in an era of streaming, algorithms and easy-to-gamify metrics.
Time and time again Billboard has proved itself rather antiquated in measuring the popularity of modern music. This is exemplified by the sheer amount of songs that have proved their longevity within the pop culture zeitgeist but didn’t reach #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Toxic” by Britney Spears only peaked at #8. “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga peaked at #2. “Video Games” by Lana Del Rey barely scraped in and peaked at #91. Given the way chart positions are calculated in the streaming era, a #1 is much easier to obtain, meaning that its acquisition is less a testament to the song’s quality, as much as it is a determiner of its fleeting virality or the devotion of the fanbase that surrounds it.
The unsteady nature of these metrics should incentivize us to move away from them as sole determiners of success. To return to the stans’ cryptic jabs: Lizzo is not a flop because Special didn’t debut at #1. Billie Eilish is not “over” because her sophomore album underperformed. We should allow music to ebb and flow with us, giving it the space to breathe across our cultural landscape and grow legs to stand on its own – without the fraught external merits. An artist’s performance on such metrics shouldn’t determine a fan base’s loyalty to them. Stanhood should be an admiration of artistry, not the structures that attempt to measure it.
Especially when such measurements are so easily gamified.