Billboard’s charts of albums and singles, published in their current form since the 1950s, are the last word in music rankings. But has the magazine’s methodology kept pace with changes in technology and music consumption?
This week BigChampagne, a company that tracks online media, announced the Ultimate Chart, a challenger that it says measures music’s popularity more fully by counting not only sales and airplay (as Billboard does) but also online streams and an array of social-networking services.
“We’re rewriting the top of the charts for the new music business and enlisting the help of its chief architects to surface the most popular music that the charts have overlooked,” Eric Garland, BigChampagne’s chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday after announcing the chart at the New Music Seminar industry conference in New York.
BigChampagne has long been the music industry’s go-to source for information about unauthorized file sharing. But the company has said that the Ultimate Chart will measure only legitimate services, like YouTube, MySpace, Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook.
Supplanting Billboard’s chart authority would be a difficult task for any new media-measurement service. But BigChampagne’s announcement taps into a common frustration in the music industry about how success can be measured at a time when streaming, ring tones and licensing for television commercials may have a bigger effect on the bottom line than record sales do.
And while rankings proliferate all over the Internet — on iTunes’ list of its top downloads, for example, and smaller services like Next Big Sound, which monitors bands’ Web presence — no one has pulled them all together.
“We need to be informed and have insight into all forms of data that isn’t being tracked by any one entity,” said Tom Corson, general manager of the RCA Music Group. “It’s reflective of the disruption and fragmentation in this business.”
The first Ultimate Chart, covering singles, was released on Tuesday. And aside from the top two slots, it differs significantly from Billboard’s comparable chart, the Hot 100.
For the week that ended July 11, Billboard’s Hot 100 had Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” at No. 1 and Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” at No. 2. The Ultimate Chart, measuring the week to July 13, had those songs in reverse order. But No. 3 on the Ultimate Chart — Shakira’s World Cup song, “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” — is a distant No. 39 on Billboard; the Ultimate’s No. 4, Eminem’s “Not Afraid,” is No. 11.
The most notable disparity is Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” which is No. 5 on the Ultimate Chart; on the Hot 100, the song peaked at No. 5 in February, but fell off the chart entirely in June.
That would seem to indicate the continued popularity of the song — or at least of Mr. Bieber — on social-media networks even if downloads and radio play have cooled. For artists and record companies, that extra attention can mean the difference between a blip and a long-lasting hit.
Billboard’s chart managers declined to comment for this article, but over the years the magazine has often tweaked its algorithms to reflect changes in the marketplace.
Three years ago, for example, it added two sources for the Hot 100 in addition to its longstanding reliance on sales and airplay: AOL and Yahoo’s streaming services.
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