Ultimate Chart: A New Way To Rank Music Popularity

[mhschmieder]

http://www.sonicstate.com/news/2010/08/ ... ate-chart/

http://www.ultimatechart.com/

This is long overdue.

I'm wondering also if it will help self-promoted independent artists to get past startup phase more quickly, when they have true commercial potential?

[James Steele]

Dunno. In some way that is hard for me to articulate, I don't like it.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Dunno. In some way that is hard for me to articulate, I don't like it.

Can I play? To save you from reading this entire post, I'll cut to the chase. What is listed in the chart as "popular" is being confused with what is "best" and those are two very different things. It falsely elevates based on rates of transfer. Put another way: cream rises to the top; crap floats. They are measuring the floating material only and take nothing into account for longevity or quality of the material - just how much flotsam is out there and what it looks like this week.

What is troubling about this is:

1- It is extremely easy for the "publisher" of the chart to manipulate the "data" to meet their own criteria and agenda.

2- The "outlets" they combine have their own rating systems, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can combine those ratings (sometimes based on a completely different set of criteria) and arrive at a definitive answer as to what is "popular."

3- Not to offend anyone (OK, I really don't care if you're offended - but the regulars know that) but the survey is also based on the model of computer distribution, and while that is clearly how a lot of music is distributed, it is not how all music is distributed. Also, people might download something and think it sucks. The fact that they downloaded it only means they could. What people actually PAY FOR is a better estimate of what's popular, IMO.

3a -There's TV and radio play, but do they include BMI, ASCAP, SESAC and other licensing agents in the #s?

3b - What about person to person copying? A lot of people don't share music on peer to peer networks, but from person to person.

Had enough? OK, but I want extra points...

4 - Converting raw data into essentially "polls" or statistics is never an accurate way to measure things, especially where humans and large numbers are involved. In politics you see this all the time. Polls tell you one thing but the people being polled are usually within a select group, like people with land lines in a particular demographic. Then you see the actual vote and you wonder what the pollsters were doing.

Add to that the fact that statistics can be manipulated to serve a particular end, and (another simple fact) that statistics never tell the actual "story." Look at post counts on this forum. From the raw data you might assume that the persons with the highest post count are the most productive, or the most verbose, or maybe the most knowledgeable but none of that is true for any one member. Magicd has less than 1000 posts, yet if you are going to get the best possible answer to ANY DP question, that's the guy. Yet he ranks about 60th in terms of posts not including bounced members who had much higher post counts. The fourth highest guy on the list hasn't even posted in about a year or more.

5 - Finally, the "value" of any such survey (if any) is for a very narrow and specific style of music. That's fine for that music, but what about the various genres of music? There's a lot of stuff the survey doesn't take into account. Add to that it wants to attempt to take into account the "week's most popular flavor" and you end up with an extremely shallow sampling of what is being electronically transferred this week. That doesn't necessarily equate to what is popular, per se, and to elevate the status of the most transferred item to being the most popular is not at all accurate.

Let me put it another way... probably the most transferred paper money in the USA is the dollar bill. Millions and millions change hands every minute. Based on that, you might say the dollar is the most "popular" and in some ways I guess it is. But if asked which is the "best" or "most popular" in the opinion of the end user, I suspect that $100 bill is way more "popular" even though it is less frequently traded by most people.

VOTE HERE:

[mhschmieder]

I still haven't had time to thoroughly examine this new charting service, or even read MLC's post as deeply as I would like to, but from the get go I had some suspicion about ulterior motives and whether this is meant to serve labels, licensing agencies, or (yeah, right), actual artists.

Remember back before the late 80's or thereabouts, when Billboard charts were based on orders placed vs. units sold (possibly an oversimplification, but it was definitely biased more towards pre-sales than actual sales, meaning that payola and other questionable practices came into play in determining who was atop the charts, along with simple hype). This is why so many so-called "popular" albums made their way to the remainder section so quickly...

Once they changed the formula to be based more realistically on actual sales, it became suddenly obvious how popular Rap/Hip-Hop and Metal actually were. And I'm not promoting or demoting those genres; it's just a simple observation.

Ultimately, what will matter most about this new rating service is whether it is fair, and whether it helps the artists more than whatever informal set of rules is currently in play.

[James Steele]

Metal? Popular? Of course it wasn't/isn't! Just ask the Grammys in the 80s'... they more or less ignored the whole genre in what is arguably its "golden age." One more reason why I think the Grammys are irrelevant.

[mhschmieder]

Ian Anderson still gets mileage during on-stage banter, about how Jethro Tull was awarded for best "metal" album of the year back in the late 80's, for "Crest of a Knave".

I can hardly think of a guitarist who is more the antithesis of Heavy Metal playing than Martin Barre!

I love Tull, and I love good Metal. But the Grammy committee, Billboard, and probably this new Ultimate Chart service as well, are a bit clueless about categories and genres...

[James Steele]

Yeah-- I remember that well. Tull beat out Metallica. Those of us who we raised on metal bands needed no further evidence that the Grammys pretty much were clueless about the genré and I felt like they actually hostile to it. It's dominated by pop and people who are big players and producers and I'm sure they weren't about to let the riff raff in.

Oh... I must say that "Locomotive Breath" comes close to being a hard rock / metal song. Just replace the flute solo with a guitar solo.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Always been a fanatic about Ian Anderson and Tull and would never have put them in Heavy Metal. Then again I wouldn't put them in the jazz cat either, yet you find Anderson voted best jazz flautist in other places.

I guess all you really need is a fuzz box and a dotted either-sixteenth note and your golden? All kidding aside, while Anderson is a great musician his writing is clearly Rock and Blues (not R & B) for his earlier stuff. I'd actually put him in Classical before Heavy Metal.