BigChampagne

BigChampagne is an online service that provides a lot of fascinating media consumption information through interactive charts. Unfortunately there is not much content freely provided.
To see their service at work, you can watch a short video here. There is also this NetVibes page they have created. It aggregates a lot of news sources. Worth taking a look.

1001 Albums You Must Hear vs Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums

What do the “1001 Albums You Must Hear before You Die” book and the Rolling Stone Magazine “The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” have in common?
315 albums.
The Rolling Stone list has 185 albums absent from the longer list, but 46 of those are compilations, a category that was not included in the 1001 Albums list.
So it is more accurate to say that the Rolling Stone selection includes 139 albums that did not make it to the 1001 Albums selection.
107 artists released those 139 albums. Most of them have other albums mentioned by the 1001 Albums list. The Beatles, for example, have 7 albums in the 1001 list. In the Rolling Stone list, all these 7 are mentioned, plus another 4.
There are however 27 artists that are only mentioned by Rolling Stone. Jackson Browne is mentioned with 3 albums, No Doubt and The Meters have 2 albums each. The other 24 artists include Barry White, Graham Parker, Steve Miller Band and Weezer with one album each.
Sources: 
1001 Albums
RS 500 Albums

Hall & Oates Revival

MSNBC reports, amusingly:

• Hall & Oates is fourth-best-selling duo of all time (13 million albums shipped, according to the Recording Industry Association of America).
• Sales have been on the increase: In 2009, they sold 177,000 albums, up from 161,000 in 2008. In that same time period, digital song downloads were up 19 percent to 547,000.
• In an appearance that veered into the it's-so-uncool-it's-cool territory, late last year Hall & Oates went on QVC to sell their boxed set, "Do What You Want, Be What You Are: The Music of Daryl Hall and John Oates" (RCA/Legacy). QVC may conjure visions of late-night, drug-fueled purchases of vacuum cleaners, but Wolfson cautions people not to mock. "The boxed set sold 5,000 copies the first hour," he says. In total, the $50 set has sold 15,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, peaking at No. 89 on the Billboard 200.

Hit Men

Hit Men, written by Fredric Dannen is an excelent book about the music recording industry. I just received my copy and am enjoying the first chapters right now. You can find more about it at Amazon. What I really must highlight is Robert Christgau's review of it:

But at some level they recognize what Dannen will not--historically, crime and pop music go way back. All the formally renegade urban styles--jazz up through at least the '30s, and also Argentine tango and Greek rebetika and Portugese fado and many others--thrived in the underworld, and the ad hoc unpredictability of the work has always favored tough guys who know how to collect what's owed them.

Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Songs - wikipedia's take

The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" was the cover story of a special issue of Rolling Stone published in November 2004, a year after the magazine published its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The song list was chosen based on votes by 172 musicians, critics, and music-industry figures.
The list is almost entirely composed of North American and British artists. Of the 500 songs, 352 are from the United States and 117 from the United Kingdom; they are followed by Ireland with 12 entries, Canada with 10, Jamaica with 7 (most of them by Bob Marley or Jimmy Cliff), Australia with three (AC/DC with two) and a lone song from Sweden (by ABBA).
The list includes just one song not in English -- "La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens (345); only three songs from the 21st century -- "Hey Ya!" by OutKast (180), "Lose Yourself" by Eminem (166), and "Stan" also by Eminem (290); and two songs from the 1940s -- "Rollin' Stone" by Muddy Waters (459) and Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" (111).
With 23 songs on the list, The Beatles are the most-represented musical act. John Lennon is the only artist to place multiple songs in the top 10 (as a member of the Beatles and as a solo artist). The Beatles are followed by The Rolling Stones (14); Bob Dylan (12); Elvis Presley (11); The Beach Boys and The Jimi Hendrix Experience (7); Chuck Berry, U2, James Brown, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Sly & the Family Stone (6); and The Clash, The Who, The Drifters, and Elton John (5).
Three songs appear on the list twice, being performed by different artists. "Mr. Tambourine Man" performed by Bob Dylan and The Byrds, "Blue Suede Shoes" by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins and "Walk This Way" by Aerosmith and Run-DMC.
The shortest tracks are "Great Balls Of Fire" (#96) by Jerry Lee Lewis and "Rave On" (#154) by Buddy Holly, both with a duration of one minute and fifty seconds.
Source: Wikipedia

Billboard's in-depth analysis of music sales and Long Tail (2004-2009)

In The Long Tale (November 14, 2009), Billboard’s Glenn Peoples brings up a lot of data as he looks for Long Tail evidences in music sales. There is a lot of highlights, including the sales profile of Phil Collins'albums.

• So far, at least according to Nielsen SoundScan data on U.S. music sales from January 2004 through October 2009, that revolution hasn’t arrived—although the demand for albums has changed.
• Sales of albums, especially digital ones, became significantly less concentrated around hit releases since 2004. But sales of digital tracks—which this year account for 56% of digital sales by track volume—have grown more concentrated in hits during the same time period.
• Essentially, hit songs are becoming more important while hit albums are becoming less so.
• From 2004 to 2008, the number of new albums released per year has more than doubled.
• From 2004 through October 2009, the most popular tracks have steadily and consistently grabbed market share—and tens of millions in unit sales—from less popular songs. The growth is slight at the top of the chart and more noticeable further down. The top 10 increased to 3.1% from 2.1%. The top 40 increased to 8.3% from 5.9%.
• The top 200 tracks—that’s just 0.002% of the nearly 9 million currently listed at Amazon—have a market share of 18.7%. In 2004, their share was 14.5%.
• Since iTunes launched variable pricing in early April 2009, the top 200 tracks have retained their market share even as the number of tracks purchased each week has fallen by about 6%.  From April to July, the top 200 averaged a 24% share of each week’s total track sales
• Album sales don’t look that different from five years ago in terms of the demand curve. The most significant change has been the overall decline in album sales: 32% from 2004 to 2008.
• From 2004 to 2008, sales of the 5,000 albums that make up the head of the demand curve dropped 40.5% while sales of the million-plus albums that make up the tail declined 27.4% And not only did sales of popular albums decline more than those of others, the most popular ones declined the most. Unit sales of the top 1,000 albums of 2008 dropped 41.7% from their 2004 levels. The second thousand most popular albums dropped 36%, the third thousand fell 33.2%, the fourth 31.2% and the fifth 30.9%.
• Five years ago, the top 5,000 albums represented 74.4% of total sales; in 2008 they accounted for 70.2%. Some of this comes from the sheer number of albums that now make up the end of the tail.
• Demand for digital albums is moving further down the tail than that for albums overall. In 2008, the top 5,000 albums accounted for 64.7% of digital album sales, as opposed to 70.2% of album sales overall. And the market share of the top 5,000 digital albums is shrinking as niche products take away sales from more popular titles. But the rate of change is slowing.
• In 2006 and 2007, the most popular 100 albums lost the most market share in absolute terms. The three percentage points of market share they lost represented about 1 million units. In 2008, albums from No. 101 to No. 200 lost the most share in absolute terms. But in relative terms, the albums in the middle of the head fared the worst in terms of losing share. From 2004 to 2008, albums from No. 301 to No. 400 lost the greatest percent of their market share—34%. From 2005 to 2008, Nos. 401-500 suffered the most—22%. From 2006 to 2008, albums as far down as No. 4,000 lost a greater percent of their market share (7%) then the top 100 ranks (5%).
• Within the tail of digital albums, the truly obscure albums seem to be pulling sales away from those that are merely unpopular. In 2008, albums as unpopular as those around No. 8,000 gave up market share to titles that were even less popular.
• One such album—former Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli’s ‘Live at the Triple Door’—sold 1,400 digital copies in 2008 and ranked at No. 6,736. As ‘The Long Tail’ would have predicted, an album with that sales rank benefitted from the effects of widespread digital distribution. But during the past three years the gain for an album at No. 6,736 was nil: around 75 additional copies.
• In terms of overall album sales—not just those of digital albums—the greatest changes may be taking place in what might be called the middle class: albums ranked from No. 200 to No. 2,000 in terms of sales. Sales of these albums dropped as much as 34% from 2006 through 2008, compared with the 27% decline in overall sales.
• Most likely because so many music stores closed, catalog chestnuts like the Phil Collins collection ‘Hits’ have stayed close to their overall sales rank while selling far fewer units. In 2006, ‘Hits’ sold 116,000 copies, enough to rank at No. 699 among the best-selling albums of the year. By 2008, ‘Hits’ sold 82,000—a 29% drop—but ranked at No. 703.
• In the digital world, which relies less on merchandising programs, ‘Hits’ is all but absent: It hasn’t cracked the list of the top 10,000 digital albums since 2006. Bargain catalog makes an appealing impulse buy at physical stores, and since many retailers can’t carry all of Collins’ albums, they focused on a hits collection. In the digital world, consumers have many more options for Collins’ catalog. In addition to ‘Hits,’ shoppers can choose from his studio albums like ‘No Jacket Required’ (No. 3,273) and ‘But Seriously’ (No. 9,652) or buy their favorite tracks individually.

Number of different albums in one year

In 2008, more than 450,000 different physical albums sold at least one copy over the Internet during 2008 compared to 390,000 in 2007. "More long tail support", according to the source.

Source: SoundScan via David Kusek's blog

Counterpoint to the Long Tail

In November of 2008, Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, UK's royalty collection society, presented a counterpoint to the Chris Anderson's famous Long Tail argument.
Working with Mblox founder Andrew Bud and his colleague Gary Eggleton, they analysed millions of transactions from an undisclosed large digital music provider in UK. According to the Register, they produced a spreadsheet with 1.5 million rows - so large it required a special upgrade to their Excel software (and more RAM).
I quote the Register: they discovered that instead of following a Pareto or "power law" curve, as Anderson suggested, digital song sales follow a classic Log Normal distribution. 80 per cent of the digital inventory sold no copies at all - and the 'head' was far more concentrated than the economists expected.
Key findings:

• Of the 13 million available tracks [on iTunes UK], 10 million don't sell at all. They don't say over what period.
• 80% of the singles revenue came from the top 52,000 songs (In Anderson's original Rapshody research, the equivalente number would be only 60%);
• Moreover, approximately 80% of sales revenue  came from around 3% of the active tracks. Factor in the dormant tail and you’re looking at a 80/0.38% rule  for all the inventory on the digital shelf.
• Finally, only 40 tracks sold more than 100,000 copies, accounting for 8% of the business.
• Of the 1.23 million albums available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.

Page highlights this insight: “scarcity forces a competition-like structure to pass the cut-off point, which paradoxically creates value by increasing the effort of content suppliers to win”.


Comments: The Register calls The Long Tail a manifestation of "Policy Based Evidence Making". I find that funny. More intriguing and relevant is whether Mr. Page work is biased in any form.
Sources: a short interview with Will Page; Chris Anderson's response; a long interview with Page and Register's opinionated take.

Sales of New Album Releases in 2008

According to SoundScan, 105,575 new albums were released in 2,008 in the United States. Half of them were digital-only. 17,000 of those sold one copy in 2008. Another 63,000 sold up to 100 copies. 24,000 releases between 100 and 10,000 copies. 1,517 sold more than 10,000 units. 112 new albums sold more than 250,000 units.

• Veteran music industry executive Tom Silverman considers 10,000 to be the "obscurity line"above which an act begins to have some measure of recognition. (He considers this an arbitrary measure. A decade earlier, the obscurity line could be considered 50,000 units).

• 250,000 units is a threshold where a record can be considered lucrative.

Source: Music Coaching.com