Last week the data monitoring service Big Champagne brought a whole new meaning to the words “Chart buster" when they announced that they intend to revolutionize the industry and give Billboard/SoundScan a run for their money. Their release of “Ultimate Chart," lit up the blogs; a hit chart that ignores traditional brick and mortar sales and instead aggregates data from electronic sources to determine what is truly the “most popular" music.
I chatted with Big Champagne's CEO, Eric Garland over tea at the Beverly Hills Montage. As a result, you are about to know what just about every other blogger got wrong about this new chart's methodology and just how “ultimate" it might be.
I was excited to learn about Ultimate Chart. It's something I suggested the industry needed in a 2008 article called “The Golden Click." You can read it for yourself if you're interested, but the basic theme was how, in the new music business, will we evaluate a “hit record?" Does a tracking physical sale matter when consensus is that most music today is acquired illegally? Or as one of my readers put it, does an industry that is below the radar, still need the radar?
Does Ultimate Chart definitively answer the question? Let's see.
THE BEFORE TIME
I recall when SoundScan hit the street in 1991. Its imperial data revealed something most in the north east US didn't want to know: the biggest selling CDs were not what major labels shoved down our throats with payola and TV campaigns, mainly suburban hair-band rock and harmonized pop. Back then SoundScan bomb-shelled the truth: Country music is what most people buy and Rap was in close second. Of course, this was all before iTunes entered the scene, thus creating a digital sales metric. And it seems, according to some sources, that CD sales figures are presently being maintained mostly by people who still confuse RAM cache with Johnny Cash.
So, I naturally thought that a new chart based on non-mainstream data would yield a new truth, like what we saw in 1991; that a chart based on pure street data would have the hippest, most cool and most creative artists. But, I was disappointed when I saw the first results of Ultimate Chart. You'll see why in a second. (If you can't wait look at the comparison charts below.)
MYTH v. REALITY
First, bit of mythos debunked: Ultimate Chart DOES NOT use data from music that is traded/streamed in an illegal fashion, even though Garland claims they could. WTF?
Although the company does claim to monitor all P2P activity, Garland was clear with me while sipping his Earl Grey, “For the Ultimate Chart there is a Chinese wall where the [illegal data] is excluded." This assumption, made by most bloggers covering this story, was disappointment number one for me. P2P data mixed with real sales data would be an interesting chart indeed and something that insiders cannot get in an organized format. Minus that, Ultimate Chart will only give me data acquired from legal but solely digital sources.
Presently, Billboard uses a combination of two Nielson products: bar code scanning (SoundScan) at the point of purchase and BDS (a digital wave sample data-base for over-the-air monitoring). Billboard will argue, therefore, that their chart is more accurate in terms of what people will pay for, and I don't think Big Champagne will take issue with that. Garland would just say, “Who f—king cares. Charts are supposed to tell us what people like. Ours does that better than theirs. Why? Because we're looking at people's native choices, not just the forced 'choices' of commercial fluff shoved down their throat from major label douche bags."
Okay, Garland didn't actually say any of that to me, but reading between the lines of his press releases and some off-the-record comments he made in our chat, it's fairly clear that he would if he wasn't concerned about offending potential future clients, the major labels and Billboard, itself.
WHAT DO THEY CLAIM?
Ultimate Chart claims to be “an unprecedented aggregation of timely, relevant metrics." And by “relevant" Garland means the following: Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, VEVO, Pandora, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL and many, many others, including ClearChannel.
WAIT! ClearChannel?!? But doesn't their data make up a significant portion for the Billboard charts? Yes. So how much of Ultimate Chart's data comes from ClearChannel as opposed to their “other sources?"
“A very small part," says Garland. A vast majority comes from smaller chains and a group called, Street Pulse, an independent service that includes some Big Box data.
While SoundScan uses a one-sale-equals-one-point formula and then combines them from its many reporting stores for a ranking, Ultimate Chart takes a radical departure. It gives physical sales more weight than stats generated from streams. Garland: “We weigh a song purchased [like on iTunes] at hundreds of times a song streamed. On this chart it's better to sell a few things than stream a great many things."
So, one song sold on iTunes, in theory, would equal 100s of streams on say, Spotify. This seems to kind of go against the theme of the revolution Garland wants to usher in, I began thinking. Disappointment number two.
The Ultimate Chart website claims they, ..."collect billions of points of data, online and off. Our machines are very clever [and] real people grade the computers' work to ensure accuracy."
So rather than rely solely on a computer to count beans, like BDS or SoundScan, or humans, who in the past were vulnerable to graft, Big Champagne has its staff of twenty-six “very clever" people check the various reports generated by others over a one week period before publication. Leading to Disappointment number three: it's not a fully automated process. I'm sure the humans are as clever as Garland's claims, but they are still prone to human error. And clever humans just make clever errors.
And finally, disappointment number four: one metric that Ultimate Chart does NOT use is CD sales from big box stores. Now I know the tech-biased media has convinced most that CD sales are relics, but it's the metric that still makes up 75%-85% of all recorded music sales in the US. How one ignores this is, in my view, pure techno-arrogance. But, Garland would say, it's pure progress. He doesn't feel that Big Box sources tell an accurate enough picture (although I get the feeling that he would not turn down their data, should they agree to provide it— which they don't, even to most labels).
This marginalizing of traditional main stream sources like Big Box and Clear Channel data and replacing it with clever humans and clever machines who vet reports from hard-to-audit digital sources has me curious to see the results. I'm looking forward to seeing cool obscure shit in the top slots, like, deep cuts of Lou Reed, circa 1984, B-sides of old Stones LPs or Live/Dead. What did I find?
ULTIMATE YAWN
I took Billboard's Top 200 chart, Billboard's Digital Songs chart, iTunes Top Singles chart and compared them in the same week to Ultimate Chart. If you look at the table you'll see that all charts place virtually the same artists and songs in similar positions in the top ten. Shocked?
New data, same old gas?
So, if the Ultimate Chart methodology is so revolutionary why are the results so similar to traditional charts?
Garland suggests that this is proof that his system works, “All charts that measure popular music at the highest levels have commonality. The most popular artists are the most popular artists. That's how we know the Ultimate Chart is an accurate reflection."
Nielsen SoundScan has never maintained that they catch every sale. Only that their method creates a mean average and a bird's eye view. So far, they seem to be right, and after years of tweaking, Big Champagne has succeeded in proving one thing: that Nielson's method of counting point of purchase sales is just as accurate as the new one where we monitor the net.
So, we learned what we already knew: big artists sell the most records. Alright! Garland's chart is a success, in his view, because it tells us virtually the same thing as his competitors.' Is that the kind of “unprecedented data" we were hoping for right now with the industry in its greatest transition?
We'll see.
NOW WHAT?
Garland is one of the smarter people in the room, in my view. But he may be holding back for some reason.
Big Champagne plans to market the Ultimate Chart aggressively to compete directly with Nielsen, a company that has a virtual monopoly on the for-pay chart business. To do that, in my view, they will have to offer something more than a long walk around the block just to go around the corner. For this reviewer, if you're going to tout all the bells and whistles that new technology offers, then you should publish some products that counting bar codes can never deliver.
For example:
—A P2P chart of illegal streams and downloads only, so we can all see who is really getting the most ear-balls and through what torrent site so labels can go after the cash.
— A YouTube chart so artists/labels can start demanding from Google performance royalties from uploads and streams. I'm sure all the unions and PROs would salivate at the opportunity to do a blanket license with Google, but they need the data first.
Garland told me that this type of product would be a simpler render than the Ultimate Chart, which bundles many sources. “Un-bundling would take less time," he told me. He also indicated that patience will prevail as he is working on a publicly available version of exactly what I suggest above.
Okay, Eric. Your bluff is called. Let's have it. You want to make a difference in this business? Screw all this science-fair fluff. Produce something new that artists and labels can actually use to collect some friggen money and instead of just tea at the Montage, next time I'll spring for crumpets.
Mo out
