I saw this comment a while ago that tried to claim that despite Maroon 5’s best efforts to make their current single, “Beautiful Mistakes” with Megan Thee Stallion, a big, massive, world-defining hit, the song ended up underperforming.
Because at the end of the day, the point isn’t that you genuinely want to see Billboard be fair in their ruling and give the “organic” song the honor of being the biggest song in the country, it’s that you want to see your fav win and be written in the history books as an important moment of this year. I mean you can accuse Olivia Rodrigo of being an industry plant and only becoming famous thanks to her Disney connections, or you can blame the success of “Butter” on the fanbase abusing and gaming Billboard’s system to inflate the song’s stats, I just think it’s pointless bickering. Both are huge success stories, but because one has to be in competition with the other, both sides of the battle are flinging shit at each other trying to claim that one is cheating their way to the top and ruining the other’s “organic” rise. I’ve seen a lot of this recently as Olivia Rodrigo and BTS both battle for the #1 spot on Billboard. Either way, our views on music popularity are always tinged by our own biases, no matter how much we try to deny it. Or worse, we start stretching ourselves by claiming any success they do get is artificial, propped up by businessmen in shadows and products of the industry trying to dictate our tastes.
To see them try and achieve something so big and successful only to get what we interpret as “diminishing returns”. At the same time, we also like seeing our more hated artists fail. It makes us feel like we’re a part of something bigger, and our tastes are being validated by seeing that artist get to #1 or have a big hit single that goes viral on Tik Tok. We like seeing our favorite artists thrive and achieve landmark goals. Controversial take, but I feel like music discourse would be a lot more tolerable if we admitted to ourselves how often we project onto certain artists and their success.
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