Mariah Carey: Rainbow [Columbia, 1999]not a real r&b thrush but good enough to fake it ("Heartbreaker", "Bliss") *
>>128898575Friendly reminder that Mariah's ten consecutive #1 hits were fake and CBS did some massive manipulation to get them like giving away 49 cent singles to inflate sales.
>>128898657Protip: Pat Boone's 72 hits were just as completely fake
The Soundscan era is interesting because it saw hard rock and country make large sales leaps while prior to that, they sold but the labels didn't like to promote them as they weren't considered "respectable" genres. The spirit of Mitch Miller lived on in the record industry well into the rock era.
>>128898694>>128898685Chart manipulation has always been a thing, probably the closest the Billboard ever got to honesty was the 2000s Napster era right before streaming.
Listening to Mariah's hits I honestly don't get it. Her songs are all just a tuneless wall of noise and I can't remember a thing from them. Not a lyric, melody, hook, etc. anywhere.
>>128898694A friend of mine was a buyer at a large Massachusetts record store in the pre-Soundscan days. Back then, the charts were compiled by calling the big stores and asking them who was selling the most that week. Not exactly a precise science and tailor-made for abuse. My friend would get called by the record company reps ahead of time to ask him how many promo records he "needed" and to tell him which titles the company was trying to push that week.
>is intellectual in all other areas other than music i don't get Xgau
>>128898716Horrible music. Really hammers home the tyranny of normies. Imagine living in some whitebread flyover state, not having internet or any cool people around you, and this is the only shit you're exposed to. The hustle and bustle of the big city doesn't sound too bad after you've had Mariah Carey screaming in your ear.
Cuckgau apparently had some surgery recently hope he's doing well with that.
>>128898806At least Swift's hits had a few Max Martin hooks in them.
>Mariah's #1 hits disappear the moment she stops fucking Tony MolottaCosmic.
>>128899255I'm old and I worked as a singles buyer for a local record chain in the 90s.>we were still selling lots of cassette singles at that time as well as various kinds of CD singles>Sony were setting a list price for Mariah Carey's singles at just 49 cents and were deluging our store with hundreds of them>they never did this for Gloria Estefan, Celine Dion, Destiny's Child, or Basia all big artists at that time>not even Streisand, who managed a Top 10 with Bryan Adams during this period>surprise surprise, none of those artists were fucking Tony Molotta>even with the 49 cent list price we still had tons of unsold Mariah singles we couldn't get rid of
Without getting further context from the article, I'm not sure it's precise to say sales numbers were manipulated. A sale is a sale, whether it's 49 cents or six times that price. If she sold a million singles at the cost of 49 cents, and Janet Jackson sold a million singles at $2.99, their records are each going home with a million people. I think that's the metric that the Billboard charts is really trying to reflect.If record executives were conspiring with retailers to give her the best shot at selling lots of units, I could believe that. I'm sure there were many fringe benefits to being married to Tommy Mottola. But in this case it sounds more like Garth Brooks, whose sociopathic greed take over all the sales records from Elvis and the Beatles has seen him essentially give away his music in multiple formats so he can artificially inflate his numbers.
>>128899444She occupies the same niche as Jack Jones or one of those guys from the 60s who sold a lot of records and Goodwills are peppered with their albums but nobody really cares about them anymore and their stuff aged like old milk.
>>128899444Mariah's later run on Virgin produced some hits but nothing near what she did with Columbia and Molotta.
>>128899535of course not she was getting older by then and Britney, Christina etc had arrived
>>128899444>>128899369i think that's unfair and surely Mariah must have had something going for her. record labels did this for all of their acts in the 90s but there were tons of also-rans like Yaki-Da, Amanda Marshall, and La Bouche nobody remembers. why for example did Mariah, Celine, Sheryl Crow, etc succeed while Amanda Marshall didn't even though the label was using the same tactics with her like 49 cent singles? maybe she was just shit and nobody wanted her music. at the end of the day Payola alone doesn't buy you success, the actual listener has to want what you're selling them.
>>128898694i didnt know that
>>128899830Yes. Prior to the Soundscan era hard rock, country, rap, etc sold but the numbers were manipulated in such a way to not reflect it because record labels had never quite gotten out of the 50s mindset that only pop, folk, and jazz were respectable genres and the other stuff was for low IQ proletarian scum.
having worked for labels and stores at this time, this was done for everybody, fuck, i remember when Nevermind came out, the store i was working at received 100 free "clean" CDs to kickstart the album, as we were a Soundscan store.
>>128899205>Cuckgau>not being jadedLolHopefully that hack croaks soon
another christgau image filtered
>>128898716If the academy did one good thing it was to snub Mariah Carey at the 1996 Grammys. She was at this stage of her career where she was "larger than life", highly manipulated sales/airplay like >>128898657 said.She was up against Joni Mitchell and Annie Lennox, kek. But the biggest mog was Alanis Morissette winning record of the year over her.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agh512KYLwY
>>128901417the bugger OP gave it a generic file name so it can't be filtered
