Correction:
An earlier version of this article misquoted Rishi Mirchandani. The quote should have read, “The goal is to really translate those metrics into actionable marketing insights that can inform our decision making.”
In pop music, being No. 1 doesn’t always mean you’re on top.
Earlier this year, the Oregon rock band the Decemberists reached the summit of the Billboard 200 albums chart with “The King Is Dead.” By selling a measly 94,000 copies of the album in its first week, the band snatched the top spot from the veteran California band Cake, whose “Showroom of Compassion” had sold an even measlier 44,000 copies the week before.
If seeing these two bands atop the Billboard 200 gave you the impression that they were the biggest names in music, you got the wrong impression.
In an era of iTunes and Amazon, Spotify and Pandora, album sales don’t tell you what they used to. With so many routes to our eardrums, how do we measure the actual popularity of pop music? It’s something various companies are scrambling to figure out.
“Album sales as representative of the success of artists is a failing metric,” says Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, a media marketing company that has aimed to track music’s popularity in the digital age for more than a decade. “It no longer adequately explains or offers real insight into the market dynamics.”
And those dynamics are still important. Even if albums aren’t selling, an artist’s popularity can still be monetized. With sponsorship opportunities and licensing deals on the line, managers need to know how much their acts are worth. Concert promoters need to know what venues an artist can fill and how much to charge for tickets. Labels need to know whether the money they’ve spent on marketing and promotion has been effective.
For the rest of us, the charts mean something else. “A chart provides a venue for fans to talk about who’s winning,” says Jeff Leeds, editor in chief of Buzzmedia Music, which runs a network of music blogs that include Stereogum and Idolator. “It’s not that different from the way polls in politics provide a venue for pundits and talking heads to talk about who’s winning or losing and why. . . . But like a poll, a chart is merely a snapshot, and is only as accurate as the methodology behind it allows.”
Rival rankings
Last July, Big Champagne launched the Ultimate Chart in hopes of tracking the popularity of songs and artists across an array of platforms. Next Big Sound, a Colorado-based company founded in 2008, ranks popularity in the digital realm with two charts that are geared toward the industry. We Are Hunted, a Web site launched in Australia in 2009, aims to measure fan engagement by ranking the 99 most popular songs on Earth based on global impressions online and the “enthusiasm and sentiment” behind them.
The charts are free for all to see, but the data that drive them come at a price. Big Champagne and Next Big Sound make money by selling the data to managers, companies, promoters and record labels.
Rich Westover, vice president for promotion research and information systems at Island/Def Jam records, says he uses Big Champagne’s data to see whether the label’s artists are resonating with fans across demographic and geographic boundaries.
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