Friday, April 25, 2014

THE WAYS A SONG CAN IMPACT THE CHR CHARTS



CHR is essentially "pop", or mainstream music. It gets the big audience numbers--for instance, right now, the #10 song on the pop charts sees similar audience numbers as the #1 song in country, which carries the next highest audience. The #12 song on pop, relatively speaking, can be the #1 song in HAC in audience share. #15 on pop gets #1 in rhythmic and urban. #24 in pop translates to about #1 in urban AC and AC. #28 in pop translates to #1 in alternative. So CHR is the major chart, and it more or less drives a ton of single sales: every song in the top 33 of CHR right now, for instance, is in the top 100 of itunes. With the exception of two songs, every song in the top 15 of CHR right now is in the top 21. This does not necessarily translate to album sales that hit expectations, given that acts that chart high in CHR tend to have outsized expectations compared to those that chart high in other genres, but when you drive singles sales, it builds up your brand, and over time should help album sales. There are acts (like Jason DeRulo, etc) that are more singles than album-driven, but many acts that hit it big in CHR, with over 100K in sales (a very good number in today's awful album-selling market).

What constitutes CHR? Here they are:

Friday, April 11, 2014

ALTERNATE WNTS, THE VOICE (SEASONS 5 AND 6)

We currently don't have anything that consolidates the quality of Voice performances, and the amount of buzz contestants have, into numbers. Well, with the power of social media...anything's possible. So we've used youtube shenanigans again and started normalizing things to illustrate the power of performance level across all the contestants who had their full auditions shown (sorry, Joshua Howard, and Austin whoever...among others, we can't quantify you). At this point, we have a ton of contestants so it's hard to normalize between so many, but here's what we have so far:

THE ALTERNATE WNTS, X FACTOR US (ACROSS ALL SEASONS)

I know the show's canceled, but having already done this for the Voice's Season 5 and the beginnings of Season 6 (see here) and also having done rudimentary work on AI13 with this metric (see here), we can make cross comparisons between the three shows. It's not super exact, but it's the best we can do with these numbers, since social media is everywhere for all three shows.

First, here's the contestant ranks, organized by buzz and performance levels. There will be revelations...

THE ALTERNATE WNTS, AMERICAN IDOL SEASON 13

So, we all know WNTS scours the interwebs to take aggregates of scores--whether from IDF, frauen blogs or other places. Lately, they have been taking in email submissions from people to submit their scores, because of the paucity of this stuff online.

I've got an alternate option: using the social media aspect to scour the performance value of contestants. But I'll also have something that WNTS doesn't have: a buzz meter. The social media aspect also presents an international flavor to the rankings, since it's just not centralized to America; this might make it different from WNTS, which tends to update their rankings East Coast first, then West Coast. Obviously, there's a ton of factors for what goes into the social media rating: the song being sung terribly is obviously one, but boring songs, the song being sung less well than the original, are all reasons for low(er) rankings. Higher rankings may involve creativity, good singing/emotion, good song selection, etc. The buzz meter shows who is really raking in the views. Let's note that I've consolidated each ranking for each particular night and used a Gaussian normalization to equalize the values between 0-100, much like what WNTS does. The performance ratings are somewhat similar, but also have some key differences. Take a look for yourself.

So far, I've done everything this season. Here's what I have:

IDOL: A DECIDEDLY UN-HIP SHOW SINCE 2011; ALSO: THE INCREASE OF FRAU % WITHIN SINGING COMPETITIONS OVER TIME

So, we know that within singing competitions, there's a certain "type" preferred by the voting audience. We've seen enough, that qualitatively, we say in our heads: White. Southern. Wields guitar. Male. Rock, country, coffeehouse. These all fit the major voting ingredients.

But, we also have data. Through wiki, we know what percentage of the voting audience is within the elusive 18-49 age bracket that advertisers want to sell their goods to. For comparison purposes, we will cause these the non-frau, making the key assumption that people below 18 do not count. As you will see below, I've compiled this data through the three major singing competitions, 2011 and beyond (excluding the first season of the Voice since for some reason, wiki does not provide the 18-49 numbers). And you will see that Idol...really lags behind this 18-49 demographic, for the most part, compared to the other two competitions. So that "type" might amplified on Idol precisely because, well, the 50+ types who were ages 15-30 in the '70s and '80s really want to harken to that type of music...and that's good ol' Americana--country, rock, coffeehouse, what have you. Without further ado: