On 16 March 2019, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” debuted at #19 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs (HCS) chart, while simultaneously debuting at #36 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop and #83 on the all-genre Hot 100 charts. But after just one week on these three charts, Billboard chart editors removed the song from HCS, claiming that despite references to country and cowboy imagery, “it does not embrace enough elements of today’s country to chart in its current version” (Leight, Rolling Stone). The decision to remove “Old Town Road” from HCS has been much criticized as a racially, rather than musically, motivated action (Moss, Los Angeles Times; Molanphy, Slate). Blocked from the HCS chart, “Old Town Road” nevertheless dominated 2019 with a record-breaking run at #1 on the Hot 100 chart.
The removal of a country song by a Black artist from outside the Nashville system forced critical conversation about the power of charts in maintaining discriminatory practices in the popular music industry. This public disciplinary action rendered visible the structural racism underpinning the industry, prompting debate about what charts capture, how they function, who controls them, and what they mean to genre communities. The song’s removal reignited debate about the “color line” that segregated the market in the 1920s, re-emerging in 2024 when Beyoncé released “Texas Hold ‘Em” (Crumpton, Time; Watson, SongData). While Billboard describes their charts as “neutral,” they have consistently failed to consider how they maintain segregation through editorial decisions, genre classifications, and methodology. Debate around the mobility and creativity of Black artists within and between charts reveals what Tyler (NYU P) calls a disability of the color line and the “historic and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people” in cultural spheres.
This five-year project (2026-2031) will adopt data feminist and data production studies methods to investigate how Billboard charts control access, remuneration, mobility, and opportunity for artists in the popular music industry. Focusing on Billboard’s flagship charts (R&B, Country, Hot 100), this project is concerned with the chart system’s creation, and the socio-technical, legislative, industrial, technological, and cultural conditions that have shaped its development and evolution over the last century. This approach will allow for critical reflection on how repetitive media processes, especially those reworked incrementally to maintain genre silos, constantly reproduce and reinforce the industry color line. Influenced by Crawford & Joler’s (Calculating Empires) data production studies work on technologies of power, this project sets a musicological precedent of building a genealogy that traces the chart system in the context of laws, industry practices, and technologies that shape it.
As the project investigates the disabling effect of the chart system’s racialized classification, we will be curating a list of historical instances of misclassified music and musicians. Locating artists whose careers were defined by racialized classification (instead of sonic markers of style) will enable discussion of how charts control mobility within the industry,limiting their mainstream crossover to the all-genre Hot 100 (and the economic advantages that come with it). Through this work, we will build a digital advocacy strategy for intellectual reparations (Hunter, Amistad) that addresses the legacy of whiteness that endures within the music industry, and aims to recover, redefine, and reinvest in the stories of Black musicians and their music.
Stay tuned for more on this project!
This research is supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
