Episode Overview

Title: Chris Dalla Riva: "Billboard's become a Christmas chart."
Podcast: The Gist (Peach Fish Productions)
Host: Mike Pesca
Guest: Chris Dalla Riva
Date: December 15, 2025

This episode dives into the evolving nature of the Billboard Hot 100 and explores how the ways we measure music popularity—and even how we listen—have changed across the decades. Pesca is joined by Chris Dalla Riva, data journalist and author of Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. They discuss the transition from sales and radio-driven charts to the streaming era, why Christmas music now dominates the charts every December, what pop music stagnation really means, and how technology shapes our collective musical taste.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How the Hot 100 Changed: From Sales to Streaming

• Evolution of Billboard Metrics

  • Early charts measured record sales, jukebox plays, and radio spins.
  • Today, they’re mostly driven by streaming numbers.
  • This change has made it much easier for older songs (especially Christmas tracks) to re-enter and stick on the charts.
  • "Back in the day, it was Record sales and jukebox spins and, you know, radio play now, it's. It takes into account still all that stuff. But it's mostly streaming." — Chris Dalla Riva [15:05]

• Interpretation Problems

  • Songs popular on streaming may just be convenient, “background” music, which wouldn’t necessarily have been number ones in past eras under stricter, pay-to-own conditions.
  • "There are many songs that I think people will listen to very passively that become very, very popular and stick on the charts for a long time..." — Chris Dalla Riva [15:05]

2. The Christmas Chart Takeover

• Repeat Holiday Hits

  • Every December, tracks like “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and “Last Christmas” climb the charts due to streaming.
  • Back when people had to buy “White Christmas” once, the impact was muted; now, millions re-stream annually.
  • "Billboard's become a Christmas chart." (implied by episode title and sustained discussion [16:22-17:58])

• Should They Be Counted?

  • Dalla Riva argues Christmas music skews the Hot 100 and proposes excising it to preserve the chart’s utility for both the industry and cultural observers.
  • "Is it really helpful for the person who's running an independent label to know that people are listening to Christmas music in December? Probably not. I think it could be relegated to its own chart." — Chris Dalla Riva [17:05]

3. Objectivity vs. Curation in Chart Rules

• Billboard’s Contradictions

  • Sometimes Billboard removes older tracks for “stale” chart runs to keep things fresh, but refuses to exclude seasonal songs.
  • "On the one hand, there are slaves to objectivity...boop. They remove a song based on. This is boring now." — Mike Pesca [17:58]

• Measurement Limits in the Past

  • The myth that listeners today favor oldies is challenged; people have always played old favorites, but sales-based counting missed that.
  • "If you were listening to your Beatles discography in 1985, but you'd purchased it 20 years before Billboard Nielsen, nobody would know that." — Chris Dalla Riva [18:09]

4. Is Culture More Stagnant Now?

• Better Measurement Creates a False Stagnation?

  • With improved metrics, our perception of a “stagnant” zeitgeist is a measurement artifact, not a whole new phenomenon.
  • Pesca speculates that ignorance in the charts led to more diverse, risk-taking, and thus “interesting” music.
  • "I think in a way, not knowing benefited society." — Mike Pesca [19:54]

• Always Listening to the Old Stuff

  • "People are always going to listen to old stuff that's, that's popular." — Chris Dalla Riva [19:54]

5. Billboard’s ‘Wilderness Years’ and the Broadway Legacy

• Boring Years: Late 1950s–Early 1960s

  • After rock’s first boom, top acts dropped out (army, religion, death, legal trouble) and pop limped along before the Beatles’ arrival.
  • "All those guys sort of disappear for a variety of reasons... music was... trying to find its footing again." — Chris Dalla Riva [21:13]

• Broadway’s Imprint on Early Pop

  • Spoken-song intros were common, a relic of musical theater, but have all but vanished in today’s streaming, get-to-the-chorus era.
  • "There's sort of this like half spoken, half sung part... I think pop... That really doesn't exist anymore." — Chris Dalla Riva [23:47]

6. The Soft 70s & Solo Stars

• Why Was Seventies Pop So Mellow?

  • Improved studio tech allowed gentle vocals to be recorded.
  • Many artists “went solo,” gravitating to softer, intimate songwriting.
  • "There is this pull to just sit down at the piano or sit down with an acoustic guitar... there's a quietness in the early 70s..." — Chris Dalla Riva [24:39]

• Why Are Song Covers Always Slower?

  • Pesca’s pet theory: most modern covers slow the original, which is easier and interpreted as adding “depth.”
  • "I would guess that 80% of song covers slow the song down, because that's really easy to do." — Mike Pesca [25:56]

7. Playlists, Technology, and Outliers (The ‘Royals’ Story)

• "Royals" by Lorde’s ascent partially credited to Sean Parker (of Napster/Facebook/Spotify fame), who added it to an influential playlist, jumpstarting its popularity.
• "The way we listen, the technology we listen through, influences the things we create... in really subtle ways." — Chris Dalla Riva [30:39-32:21]
• Even in an era of “more objective” measurement, taste remains subject to the whims of platform owners and curators behind the scenes.

8. Timelessness and Stagnation—Can We Even Judge?

• It’s hard to know if songs are “timeless” in real-time, especially for recent tracks; distance helps.
• Technology and engagement matter: passive listening (enabled by streaming) may make everything seem more stagnant, but it might just reflect how people were always engaging with music.

9. Youth vs. Age in Pop Music Culture

• Many complaints about “music being worse” stem from older listeners feeling unmoored from youth-driven scenes—a sign, perhaps, that pop is healthy, not stale.
• "If the... 60, 70 year old writers are all like, oh, you know, this, this, this really, I really jibe with this, that would be a sign that right there's actually stagnation." — Chris Dalla Riva [42:12]

10. Attention Competition and Pop’s Lessened Cultural Centrality

• Other media now compete with music for attention, so music’s ability to anchor the zeitgeist has faded.
• Streaming creates new passive listening habits where listeners aren’t always aware of the music playing.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Meaninglessness of Chart Objectivity:
  "There is a point... sometimes not knowing does have some advantages." — Chris Dalla Riva [19:54]
• On Passive vs. Active Listening:
  "Streaming really makes it easy to, you know, open your streaming app of choice and just click play and have no idea what's actually going on in the background." — Chris Dalla Riva [42:12]
• On the Rise of the Christmas Chart:
  "Is it really helpful for the person who's running an independent label to know that people are listening to Christmas music in December? Probably not." — Chris Dalla Riva [17:05]
• On “Royals” and the Curatorial Power of Tech:
  "This song by Lorde... that sort of jump starts Royal's popularity... the way we listen, the technology we listen through ... influences the things that we create and the things that we like." — Chris Dalla Riva [31:12]
• On What ‘Timeless’ Pop Really Means:
  "I think for most people we have a better grasp about what's good as more time passes... there's. Time will tell is really the only way you can do. You can know that stuff." — Chris Dalla Riva [37:34]
• On Youth and Stagnation:
  "If you're 60 years old and you're not understanding what's going on, I think that's actually a good thing." — Chris Dalla Riva [42:12]
• On Sabrina Carpenter & Pop Comparisons:
  "Espresso is like an earworm for the ages to the point where I don't even know if you can properly assess it other than the fact that when you hear it, you will be thinking of it for way too long afterwards." — Chris Dalla Riva [39:40]

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [13:50] – Chris Dalla Riva joins
• [15:05] – How Billboard Hot 100 metrics changed
• [17:05] – Christmas songs’ impact on the charts
• [19:54] – Has culture always been “stagnant”?
• [21:13] – Early Billboard era and the “wilderness years”
• [23:38] – Broadway and the spoken intro tradition in pop
• [24:39] – Why ‘70s pop music got so mellow
• [25:56] – The bias for slowing down song covers
• [30:39] – “Royals,” playlists, and the power of tech curation
• [37:34] – Can we judge contemporary songs’ timelessness?
• [39:40] – On Sabrina Carpenter, pop cycles, and staying power
• [42:12] – Engagement, age, and the real source of pop music complaints

Conclusion

The episode is both a deep-dive and a gently irreverent meditation on pop chart history, poking holes in music industry dogma and challenging assumptions around cultural stagnation. Dalla Riva and Pesca remind us that how we measure success—whether on the charts or in our headphones—is always evolving, and that sometimes the most “objective” numbers tell us more about ourselves than the songs themselves.