exploremusic

For much of the music world, the Billboard charts rule. Performers dreamed of debuting at #1. Fans watched as songs and albums rose and fall. And radio stations, video channels and music retailers all based their strategies after studying them every week.

Songs are ranked on Billboard using data from retail sales (via SoundScan, their point-of-purchase data collection mechanism) and radio airplay (via precise monitoring through a service called BDS Radio). The more a song/album sells or gets played on the radio, the higher its ranking. The higher a song/album’s position, the more momentum it picks up, leading to more sales and more airplay—and more profits for the label/artist/music plugger.

People have tried to game the charts for years, resulting in numerous payola scandals. Record store people were bribed to report that a certain record sold more than it actually did. Program directors and music directors pocketed cash, coke and other favours. (For the record, payola has never been a Canadian thing. In 30 years in this business, not ONCE did anyone offer me any kind of a bribe to play their record. In America and Britain, though, it’s a much dirtier business.)

There was (and to a certain extent, still is) big money to be made by people who can manipulate the record charts through fudging sales numbers and goosing radio airplay. Still, the traditional charts were the only metrics by which the music industry could determine which records won and lost. Until now.

Enter The Ultimate Chart. Big Champagne who has been tracking file trading activity on P2P sites for years. They noticed that what was being illegally traded online—i.e. what was popular—differed greatly from where songs and artists appeared on the official charts. “Why aren’t we using that data in figuring out which songs are big and which aren’t?”

Big Champagne then started monitoring legitimate music sites: plays on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. They looked at songs played on TV and those sold as ringtones. And when everything was compiled, there were big discrepancies between what Billboard reported and what Big Champagne contended was reality with music consumers.

One example is “Baby” by Justin Bieber. On the Billboard Hot 100, it peaked at #5 in February and has now disappeared from the chart entirely. But on The Ultimate Chart, it sat at #5. In July. It was still insanely popular despite being nowhere on Billboard.

Record labels and retailers love this kind of deep-sourced data. A migration from traditional Billboard charts to the Ultimate Chart would have enormous repercussions for music—even though 99% of consumers would be unaware of the switch.

We should all watch the progress of the Ultimate Chart with interest. Just another example of how the Internet is drastically changing everything about music.