Mainstream Charts Vs. Actual Interest: A Neat New Statistic
Posted by lorraine on 15th March , 2010
Synchronicity is best defined by way of example. You know how whenever you learn a new word you tend to hear it several times over the course of the next few days, having never been aware of hearing it before? That’s what synchronicity is.
I was recently tuned into a pair of new internet sites that claim to measure the activity around a band in all markets, including myspace/facebook streams, internet and FM radio play, and blog activity. I think we can all see what a handy tool this would be to bands, but that’s not the point.
As a musician I usually trend towards talk radio, preferring the blah blah blah of mostly uninteresting verbal fodder to a tune that might interrupt whatever musical thought I was in the middle of. More recently than event described in the last paragraph to the tune of two days I was listening to NPR and happened to catch a story about those two sites, one is called bandmetrics.com, and the other bigchampagne.com.
The show was essentially a debate between the company that keeps track of the mainstream top-whatevers in every catgegory of popular music, and the creators of the above two sites. The thing is that the charts keep track of one thing and one thing only: paid purchases of songs. The latter two sites measure musical success by every aspect, including “illegal” downloads. The thing I found to be most interesting was the revelation of a new statistic: songs per fan (SPF). That is to say how many songs by a particular band the average fan is interested in.
Here’s the kicker: the average chart topping best selling grammy award winning double platinum champion of the airways has an SPF of…
(Drum roll please)
1.1
image courtesy of Matthiashaas – Dreamstime.com
