How Can We Tell if a Hit is a Hit?

Scholars who analyze popular music (for example, how it is affected by industry concentration or other social and historical events) have often relied on the Billboard music charts as their data source. The data informing Billboard song rankings include a combination of album sales (both physical and digital) and terrestrial radio airplay. But musical consumption patterns over the past ten years have changed dramatically. Those individuals who listen to satellite radio, download music illegally and stream music online are not included in Billboard’s measures of song popularity. The question becomes, is Billboard still capturing the most popular songs in its chart rankings? While no solid alternative exists yet, one website has emerged that may be a promising adjunct to Billboard’s rankings: http://www.nextbigsound.com/

The website was invented by four students at Northwestern, and it allows you to measure the social network metrics of musical acts. It takes the following into account:

Next Big Sound thus measures artist popularity in many ways not captured by the Billboard rankings. Billboard is, to be sure, an industry magazine, and since record labels do not yet profit directly from digital streaming, the incentive to incorporate such measures into its rankings is not yet there.

Having just launched in August, the website has room for improvement. For example, artist information is not broken down at the regional or even the national level. But as it progresses and accumulates more data to measure musical popularity over longer periods of time, it looks to be a promising analytical tool.