Who Should Be Grading Hip Hop

The phone rang in the middle of a Friday stream that had no plan in it.

The caller was Drew Dove, and he was not calling to say hello. He is building Jam Season, a ratings and review platform for hip hop and R&B, and what he wanted to talk about was the gap between what the charts report and what is actually happening.

The argument he made is worth separating from the product he is building, because it stands on its own. The recurring headline is that hip hop is falling off, that hip hop is dead, that the genre has lost the charts. His position is that the charts are measuring a narrower thing than they used to and calling the result a verdict on the whole genre. Music is bubbling up in corners the measurement was not designed to reach: SoundCloud, YouTube, rooms full of rappers in Chicago who are recording and performing and are simply not inside the pipeline that generates a chart position.

That is a claim about instruments, not about talent. If the instrument only reads one kind of signal, a genre that has moved off that signal will look like it is disappearing whether or not it is.

The harder question came next, and to his credit he did not pretend it was solved. If you build an alternative chart out of fan opinion, you inherit every problem that fan opinion has. He described still working out the weighting, still deciding how much sales should count against how much direct response should count, still working on how to search music across services rather than pulling from one.

ElleJanelle had been circling the same idea from her own side, wanting a chart that reflects what the people around her actually rate rather than what an algorithm has decided they will like. Earlier in the same stream she had put it as a complaint about being profiled: the algorithm treats her as the fifty first version of twenty other people and keeps serving her what those twenty liked, and it is not right, and she can see the mechanism guessing.

So the shared premise is that the current arrangement is a guess presented as a measurement. Whether a fan built chart is a better guess is not something either of them claimed to have proven. It is the thing the project has to demonstrate.

The conversation drifted somewhere more useful than a product pitch.

He said the reason he took his time launching was that he had watched her build in public and decided that if he was going to come out, he had to come out correct. She took that and turned it into a general point about the moment we are in. It used to be hard to make anything because you needed a team and equipment and money. Then it got easy, and the correction went too far the other way, into the idea that none of it matters, that you can just hop on and go. Her position is that the standard still matters and the work of reaching it simply got cheaper, and that the healthy place is in the middle: easier to reach the bar, not a lower bar.

The other thing she pushed him on was writing. She thinks articles fell out of favour because social media trained everyone to take information in small bites, and that they are becoming important again, because the systems people now ask questions of are reading long form text to find out what a thing is. Whether that holds is an open question, and it is worth saying plainly that it is her read on where discovery is going rather than an established fact. It is also, transparently, the thing she is building her own week around.

Worth being precise, since the enthusiasm in the clip runs ahead of the state of the project. The web app is in final testing. The mobile apps are stated as coming later in the year. The first data point the platform is collecting is the top five, which is the oldest argument in the genre and a reasonable place to start a chart.

The waitlist number quoted on air was his own, said live and unverified.

The interview happened because a phone line was open and someone used it, which is the argument for keeping a phone line open.

But the question the clip leaves behind is not about one app. It is about who holds the scoreboard. A chart is not a neutral readout. It is a set of decisions about what counts, made by whoever built it, and every one of those decisions is arguable. The reason a new one is interesting is not that it will be fairer by nature. It is that a second scoreboard makes the first one visible as a choice.

A note on the poll below: this is a reader poll on this page, not the poll from the live show. Different question, different room.