Numbers don't lie

Sometimes I wonder who's running the Times. There's in article in today's Arts section, headlined We Are a Band, and We Play One on TV .

Somewhere in the first 10 paragraphs was something that jumped out at me.

Josh Kun: Maite Perroni was having trouble with the word "you're." Ms. Perroni, a 23-year-old Mexican singer and actress, gripped her headphones in the vocal booth of a posh recording studio high above Sunset Boulevard and tried it again. "Even in your sleep, when you're dreaming," she sang in a faltering voice, and then threw her hands up in desperation.

"The 'you're' is more quick, right?" she asked the song's producer, Peter Stengaard, who urged her on as a few bars of the mid-tempo ballad, "I Wanna Be The Rain," blasted through the studio on a repeating loop. Ten takes later, she finally nailed it.

"I was so nervous," Ms. Perroni said in heavily accented English, looking a little pale and breathless, "This album is so important for us."

Ms. Perroni is a member of RBD (known by the Spanish pronounciation, "erre beh deh"), a photogenic Mexican sextet that started out as a soap opera spin-off but now rules the world of Latin pop with feel-good teen anthems and Las Vegas-style concert productions. Yet the group remains all but unknown among English speakers, a problem its members are hoping to solve by recording their first English-language album. Due this fall, the album is being aimed at non-Latinos in the United States, as well as markets in Canada and even Asia. And on Saturday, they're playing Madison Square Garden.

"We're trying to start from scratch with a whole new audience," said Christian Chávez, a member of RBD who was raised along the Texas-Mexico border and lives, like the rest of the group, in Mexico City. "We don't want to stop with Spanish songs. We want to keep reaching for more and share our music with as many people as possible."

In other words, this is not just another Latin crossover attempt. This is the making of Mexico's first worldwide pop brand.

"For the Mexican industry this is all totally new," said Camilo Lara, president of EMI Mexico, who signed RBD to the label in 2004. "They are the first Mexican artists to be exploded on a global scale."

Mexico has had plenty of teen-pop crazes before — Timbiriche in the 1980's, and Magneto and OV 7 in the 1990's — but none ever touched RBD's international popularity. (Among Spanish-language acts, only the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo came close). RBD's four albums have together sold five million copies worldwide, a staggering figure for a Mexican pop act. Its most recent single, "Mexico, Mexico," was commissioned as the nation's official World Cup anthem.

As for the United States, Mexican pop artists have not typically fared well here in English translation. But with "Hips Don't Lie," the song by the Colombian singer Shakira, becoming the most played pop song in American radio history — not to mention one of the most downloaded songs in iTunes history — RBD might be plotting their linguistic makeover at just the right time.

"Everybody wants to buy into Latin culture, whether it's Wal-Mart, Dr Pepper or Verizon," said Chris Anokute, the Virgin Records executive who signed up the English-language album. "The only music that increased in sales last year was country and Latin. To me it's a no-brainer. It's just a matter of putting RBD in the market."

So KDKA, the first radio station in America, started broadcasting 86 years ago; most people agree that rock n'roll started shortly thereafter. According to the Times, in all that time, 'Hips Don't Lie' is the pop song that's been played the most?

So why's this factoid buried in some article about some Mexican band? If true, why doesn't the Times write an article about Shakira's song?! If not true--who's doing the fact-checking at the old grey lady?

The hallmark of a bad newspaper article is when the reporter drops something in, then goes running off while you're hanging behind waiting for the other shoe to drop. A sign of bad editing is when that fact's left in (not to mention the lack of attribution in this case).

What we have here, though, is the greatest sin--which is when you miss the story altogether. And not just miss it in the sense of never finding it, but in this case the Times is clearly aware of the fact, but has such a poor sense of its significance that they use it to set up a minor point about a mundane subject.

Sheesh. So, let's do the Times' work for it.

First, Wikipedia, which is probably where the Times reporter took the factoid from to begin with (it's scary how people think of Wikipedia as like the dictionary or an encyclopedia, when literally any liar can go in and add anything to it at anytime).

The entry on 'Hips Don't Lie' reads:

"Hips Don't Lie" is a latin-pop song performed by Colombian singer Shakira. The song was written by Wyclef Jean (who is a featured artist on the song), although Shakira assisted in writing and producing. The song was released as the second single from Shakira's second English album Oral Fixation Vol. 2 in 2006. "Hips Don't Lie" became a global success and was Shakira and Wyclef Jean's first (and to date, only) number-one single in the U.S. and the UK. ...

"Hips Don't Lie" debuted on the L.A.-based radio station KIIS-FM (on the Ryan Seacrest Morning Show) on February 14, 2006. Shakira and Wyclef Jean performed the song on the following TV shows: American Idol, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Live With Regis and Kelly, The Today Show and Total Request Live. The song can be heard in the EA Sports video game MVP 06 NCAA Baseball, the film soundtrack to Ice Age: The Meltdown, and on MySpace records. ...

A Spanish version entitled "Será, Será (Las Caderas No Mienten)" was also released. This version is sung in Spanish, except for Wyclef Jean's rap part, which remains in English. Shakira also sang another version of "Hips Don't Lie" (called "The Bamboo Version") at the half-time show of the last game of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Berlin, Germany. ...

In February 2006, "Hips Don't Lie" was released to airplay in the United States. It entered the U.S. Billboard Hot 100's top-forty in its fourth week on the chart and received the "greatest airplay gainer" title on the Hot 100 for three weeks in a row. The song achieved a peak position of #13 until it was released digitally on May 27, 2006. Shakira's record label Epic Records originally held back the release of the song's digital download to boost sales of Oral Fixation Vol. 2. When Epic finally chose to release the single digitally, the track hit #1 in the United Sates.

The single jumped from number nine to one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending June 17, 2006 due to the song's strong number-one status on the Hot 100 Airplay chart and nearly 267,000 downloads in its first week (the accomplishment broke D4L's record of 179,000 paid downloads). On the iTunes download chart, the song bumped Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous" to #2 less than 24 hours after it was digitally released. Within 3 weeks the single managed to move over 670,000 paid digital downloads. The song debuted at number sixty-four on the Canadian BDS Airplay chart on April 13, 2006. It reached a peak position of #2, and is currently in the #3 position. So far, in the six weeks it has been digitally available, the song has sold close to 800,000 downloads.

According to Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems, "Hips Don't Lie" is the most-played pop song in American radio history, being played 9,637 times in a week, breaking Gwen Stefani's previous record with 9,582 plays in a week for her #1 hit single "Hollaback Girl" in 2005.

Aha! An attribution!

The song itself doesn't seem anything special to me. Which makes me think there's a very interesting story here, involving the rising Hispanic culture intersecting with the digital multi-platform world of global pop culture. Not to mention the power of American Idol--maybe there's a perfect storm here.

Shakira's producers seem to have cleverly tapped into at least three macro factors, allowing a micro product ride the wave to record-setting sales, without benefit of the paradigm-busting strength of genius.

The Times did, ironically, sort of do this article, but in a lame way and without a news peg (the article was published before Shakira set the radio record. From For Shakira, First Came the Album, Then Came the Single:

Many music singles are released for sale ahead of their albums to generate early sales and create interest in the full collection. But the opposite was true for the Shakira single "Hips Don't Lie," which broke a digital sales record last week thanks to a cross-media marketing strategy.

"Hips Don't Lie," which features the hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean, set a record for selling the most copies of a digital song in one week after it was released May 27. The song was downloaded about 266,500 times in its first week on sale, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That broke the previous record of 175,000 copies of D4L's "Laffy Taffy."

The single was part of an effort to breathe new life into Shakira's current album, "Oral Fixation Vol. 2," (Epic Records) which was initially released in November without "Hips Don't Lie" on it. When the album appeared to be flagging on the charts, Epic planned to re-release the CD with the new single added to it. But before the re-release, the new single and related tie-ins were promoted on Yahoo Music and were released exclusively to Verizon Wireless customers.

The multimedia release deal developed rapidly in February and relied on a pre-existing relationship between Verizon and Shakira, said Charlie Walk, the president of Epic Records. ...

The fan video "went straight to No. 1 and became extraordinarily viral," said Jay Frank, the head of programming and music relations for Yahoo Music. Mr. Frank said the fan video was viewed more than a million times in the first few weeks of its release.

It's sad, it's like the Times almost had the story, but since it misses a few essential ingredients, it was a minor fluff piece, rather than a front-page zeitgeist article.

Shakira, in my opinion, is like Michael Jackson in one specific way: Just like his 'Thriller' video showed the possiblity of music videos and gave birth to something that was not there before, my guess is the success of HDL is going to be seen as the poster child for the transformation of the music industry. Heck, if she can do it....

Although I wonder about the claim that this is the most-played pop song ever on the radio. 9,637 times in one week doesn't seem that many. It's only 1,367 times a day. According to an unrelated New York Sun article, the FCC says there are 14,645 radio stations in America, of which 9,638 are FM.

Let's say 1 out of 10 of these stations would be open to playing a song like Shakira's--which is actually conservative, since Spanish is the second-most popular radio format, with Top 40 the fourth-most popular, followed by Adult Contemporary.

But even if only around 1,000 stations in the whole country play Shakira's type of music, each station would only have to play her song once a day for it to get the numbers it got!

There's something fishy about the claim that it's the most-played pop song in history. Maybe Nielsen has only recently been able to measure airplay this specifically.

The company is notoriously cagey about its data, but a quick look at its website finds:

Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems is the world's leading provider of airplay tracking for the entertainment industry. Employing a patented digital pattern recognition technology, Nielsen BDS captures in excess of 100 million song detections annually on more than 1,400 radio stations in over 130 markets in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico) and 30 Canadian markets.

Radio formats monitored include Adult Alternative, Adult Contemporary, Album Rock, Classic Rock, Contemporary Christian, Country, Modern Rock, Oldies, R&B (including Rap and Hip Hop), Spanish (including Latin Contemporary, Regional Mexican and Tropical Salsa), and Top 40. Additionally, Nielsen BDS monitors 12 U.S. Music Video Channels and 9 Canadian Video Channels.

Ah, so the way it monitors these stations--only 1,400 of them, no less--is via software that matches a known song's digital 'footprint' to what a particular station's broadcasting. I'm sure that software, in essence digital 'voice recognition', has only been developed within the last 10 years.

Further, the company probably doesn't even have the ability to input for the stations it does cover every song they're playing every second (it's not the NSA, after all), but rather uses algorithms, sampling and then projecting what it does catch first to the stations it covers, then to the radio industry as a whole. Wonder what the error rate on the formulas are.

The interesting thing about Shakira's song is all the Spanish-language stations were playing it, as well as all the English-language ones. That, combined with its great marketing strategy, probably accounts for its numbers.

However great a song some people may find Hips Don't Lie, it doesn't seem reasonable to write a sweeping statement like the Times and Wikipedia have, making it seem like the song's toppled the likes of the Beatles, Madonna, or even Frankie Valli from their place in pop history.

It's just taken its own place, on a different playing field.

Uncredited image of Shakira found all over the Web.