Billboard Revises Country Chart Methodology
Billboard has a squib today, describing its new way of computing the Country Songs chart. The chart used to be airplay alone, as compiled by Nielson; now it includes streams and downloads (though I presume there's no way to tell where and whom the downloads are coming from - that is, whether they're coming from the country audience or not). Also: "With digital download sales and streaming data measuring popularity on the most inclusive scale possible, it makes perfectly logical sense that the radio portion of the new chart calculations include airplay from the entire spectrum of monitored formats." Don't know if I'm interpreting that sentence correctly. Does it mean Billboard is now counting the airplay a country song receives on noncountry stations as well as on country stations? (In this case, is it always clear what a country song is? What about an alt-country track that gets a lot of play on Triple A but almost no play on mainstream country?*)
Guess who has a song that's number 42 on Mediabase's current country airplay chart, that was number 21 on last week's Billboard Country Songs chart, and that has just jumped to number 1 on the new Country Songs chart as a result of the change in methodology!
(I wish Billboard would tell us the actual numbers for a song: e.g., this is the number of spins (or the audience size), this is the number or streams, this is the number of downloads, this is how we weight them. I know that the difference between number 1 and number 10 is usually greater than the difference between 11 and 20, which is about the difference between 21 and 40, etc. But it would be useful to see data. Paradoxically, if your business is based on the claim that you're the best source of information, you have to limit access to that information.)
Btw, here's a track that I'm embedding 'cause I happen to like it, not 'cause it illustrates anything. It's currently 33 on the Mediabase country airplay chart, still rising but probably not much more, not in the Country Songs Top 25, and I have no idea how its streams and downloads add up, or compare (it's had 426,000 streams on YouTube for three weeks, which is solid but not amazing; for example, Kristen Kelly's "Ex-Old Man," rising equally slowly at number 30 on Mediabase, has 539,000 YouTube streams over six weeks):
[UPDATE: This particular embed is no longer up on YouTube, and I can't remember what it was. Might well be the Kix Brooks song I listed as CURRENT MUSIC up top, but I don't know.]
*EARLIER UPDATE: Okay, Triple A is so small that it's not going to make much of a difference: Mumford & Sons "I Will Wait" is number 1 on Triple A with an audience size of 2.584; if it had the same-size audience on the country chart, and you added the two together, that'd only raise its rank from something like 42 to 38 on a combined chart. But if you were to decide to call "I Will Wait" a country song, and were to add together its Triple A audience, its Hot AC audience (3.168), and its Alternative audience (12.180), you'd get a hefty 17.932. Since most country songs aren't scoring big on noncountry formats, "I Will Wait" would be at least in the mid 20s on an airplay chart for country songs that combined all radio formats. Now, I assume "I Will Wait" is not getting any country airplay and isn't getting classified as country. But let's say it got a bit more than a smattering, enough to give it a relatively small audience on the country stations, say about what it's got on Triple A: 2.584. Well then, presumably you'd have to put it on your country chart, and reasonably high. For an interesting parallel, the audience on country radio for "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (in its eighth week) isn't much higher: 2.803, and look where it's charting. (Of course, you can choose to give the noncountry charts less weight, which is probably what Billboard is doing, if my interpretation that it's including them at all is correct.)
More general Billboard article about chart changes here.
Guess who has a song that's number 42 on Mediabase's current country airplay chart, that was number 21 on last week's Billboard Country Songs chart, and that has just jumped to number 1 on the new Country Songs chart as a result of the change in methodology!
(I wish Billboard would tell us the actual numbers for a song: e.g., this is the number of spins (or the audience size), this is the number or streams, this is the number of downloads, this is how we weight them. I know that the difference between number 1 and number 10 is usually greater than the difference between 11 and 20, which is about the difference between 21 and 40, etc. But it would be useful to see data. Paradoxically, if your business is based on the claim that you're the best source of information, you have to limit access to that information.)
Btw, here's a track that I'm embedding 'cause I happen to like it, not 'cause it illustrates anything. It's currently 33 on the Mediabase country airplay chart, still rising but probably not much more, not in the Country Songs Top 25, and I have no idea how its streams and downloads add up, or compare (it's had 426,000 streams on YouTube for three weeks, which is solid but not amazing; for example, Kristen Kelly's "Ex-Old Man," rising equally slowly at number 30 on Mediabase, has 539,000 YouTube streams over six weeks):
[UPDATE: This particular embed is no longer up on YouTube, and I can't remember what it was. Might well be the Kix Brooks song I listed as CURRENT MUSIC up top, but I don't know.]
*EARLIER UPDATE: Okay, Triple A is so small that it's not going to make much of a difference: Mumford & Sons "I Will Wait" is number 1 on Triple A with an audience size of 2.584; if it had the same-size audience on the country chart, and you added the two together, that'd only raise its rank from something like 42 to 38 on a combined chart. But if you were to decide to call "I Will Wait" a country song, and were to add together its Triple A audience, its Hot AC audience (3.168), and its Alternative audience (12.180), you'd get a hefty 17.932. Since most country songs aren't scoring big on noncountry formats, "I Will Wait" would be at least in the mid 20s on an airplay chart for country songs that combined all radio formats. Now, I assume "I Will Wait" is not getting any country airplay and isn't getting classified as country. But let's say it got a bit more than a smattering, enough to give it a relatively small audience on the country stations, say about what it's got on Triple A: 2.584. Well then, presumably you'd have to put it on your country chart, and reasonably high. For an interesting parallel, the audience on country radio for "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" (in its eighth week) isn't much higher: 2.803, and look where it's charting. (Of course, you can choose to give the noncountry charts less weight, which is probably what Billboard is doing, if my interpretation that it's including them at all is correct.)
More general Billboard article about chart changes here.