aRT TK

 

lar charts are published in many other countries. As an examplar, and without loss of generality, we detail here how Billboard generates its charts, highlighting the reasons for their diminishing relevance.

ILLUs TRATIon By s TUDIo TonnE

Traditional charts. Billboard captures data from multiple sources to produce a composite ranking of individual songs, aka singles. Its two primary sources are Nielsen Soundscan (http:// www.soundscan.com/) and Broadcast Data Systems ( http://www.bdsonline. com/). Soundscan tracks sales data in real time across the U.S. and Canada. Because not all retail stores have Soundscan-enabled cash registers, the data retrieved from these systems represents only a limited set of total sales. However, even this limited set is an improvement over the previous mechanism used by Billboard—mak-

ing thousands of individual telephone calls to stores across the U.S. to ask about sales.

Broadcast Data Systems collects Billboard radio-listener statistics gathered from companies contracted by Billboard to contribute to the chart of radio airplay. Thus, not all radio airplays are captured. Once the data is captured from Soundscan and Broadcast Data Systems, it is weighted by Arbitron statistics ( http://www.arbitron. com/) and compiled by asking a random sample of the key demographic to maintain a written diary describing each radio program listened to between the hours of 6 a.m. and midnight over a period of a few months as set by Arbitron. Each diary is returned to Arbitron by postal mail; Arbitron publishes a complete set of its statistics four times per year.

In the past few years, Billboard has moved to incorporate data from digital downloads and the like, but it still constitutes only a small percentage (about 5%) of the chart’s total points. 10

Concerns. The music industry’s desire to promote and sell new music and remove long-running singles from charts has led to the fact that the older singles that consumers are still interested in are completely ignored in the charts. Music charts also lack a clear way to handle the rerelease of singles and gauge interest in music that gains popularity over a long period through word of mouth. Another issue with the historic chart-generation process is that there is no measure for the lead-up to the release of albums or singles. Though consumers may discuss an upcoming album release for days, the charts do not reflect this conversation.