Not signed in (Sign In)

Categories

Vanilla 1.1.8 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

General: Blog Buzz Sells Records

Bottom of Page

1 to 30 of 30

  1.  
  1.  
    I'm playing the role of squashed today.  This article just came across my RSS reader: Blog Buzz Sells Records

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080209-blog-social-network-buzz-correlates-to-better-album-sales.html

    The amount of online "chatter" about an upcoming album release directly correlates to higher physical album sales, according to two researchers with New York University's Stern Business School. Professor Vasant Dhar and former student Elaine Chang observed the trends of 108 albums released during the first two months of 2007 to see how different outside elements affected (or predicted) sales once the albums became available, and found that all of them had some effect or another. But certain elements of online chatter—namely blogs and social networks—seemed to be fairly accurate predictors of future success.

    Later in the article:

    As to whether all this online chatter actually causes or merely predicts online sales, the researchers can't say. "It is not possible to make such a conclusion based on this study," they wrote, nothing that it was probably a mixture of both. The quality of the artist and expectations about the album causes people to talk about the album more before release, but new buyers could be swayed as a result of the increased chatter. But Dhar and Chang warn that if there is any causality involved, it has to be totally organic in order for the effect to work. "[I]f blog posts start becoming manipulated because people think they have an impact on sales, that the predictive power might disappear because the underlying reasons for it disappear," they wrote.

    These conclusions look pretty solid if you consider the latest blog band du jour, Vampire Weekend, who sold a very respectable 27,000+ units in their first week.
  2.  
    Unfortunately, too many people are going to read this as "If a band can just get blogs to write about their album, it will sell," which is just wholly, completely untrue.
  3.  
    I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that bloggers were writing about about bands everyone already knew about during the first two months of 2007 (the Shins, Of Montreal). Chatter as a by-product of popularity vs chatter as its own buzz is probably way more indicative of sales -- hypem's "most blogged" has never been an obscurity contest, for better or worse.
    • CommentAuthorThomas
    • CommentTimeFeb 10th 2008
     
    Posted by: catbirdseatUnfortunately, too many people are going to read this as "If a band can just get blogs to write about their album, it will sell," which is just wholly, completely untrue.

     exactly.  although i think to some degree people are convinced that something is good simply by a respected website raving about it.  or at least, that's the impetus for them to check it out and try to like it.

  5.  
    That's the easy answer people aways want: "Blogs sell records" "Myspace sell records", it's so easy to understand and digest you almost wish it was true.

    The reality, of course is more complex and involves many more moving pieces both on the Internet and in fine real life.
    •  
      CommentAuthorSongbyToad
    • CommentTimeFeb 10th 2008
     
    Without wishing to downplay my own ability to change the course of human events on whim, I would be staggered if the blogs, particularly when aggregated, serve as little more than free market research about what is and isn't popular.

    Changing the world?  Well, inasmuch as we provide free A&R perhaps.  But I really wholeheartedly agree with catbirdseat above. 

    For a bunch of bloggers we seem remarkably cynical about what we do...
  7.  
    Posted by: Dave RawkblogI'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that bloggers were writing about about bands everyone already knew about during the first two months of 2007 (the Shins, Of Montreal). Chatter as a by-product of popularity vs chatter as its own buzz is probably way more indicative of sales -- hypem's "most blogged" has never been an obscurity contest, for better or worse.

    OTM re: the chicken/egg thing that quantitative research typically misses by miles and miles

    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul S
    • CommentTimeFeb 10th 2008
     

    From my own experience, I think blogs do help sell records.  I kind of lost touch with the current music scene for a number of years when I went out and found a "real" job, got married, and had kids.  In the past couple of years I've got back into the swing of things almost exclusively by reading blogs.  Blogs can't make bad music popular, so in that sense bloggers can't "change the world on a whim," but they are a great place to go to find out about the good music that's out there.   I have no idea where else I would have heard all of this stuff without blogs.  (I'd probably be stuck listening to the old stuff I post on my own blog, and nothing else.)  Heck, I've even learned a lot of new stuff about older music through blogs like Boogie Woogie Flu and The Rising Storm.  the bottom line is that almost all of the CDs I've bought in the last two years are because of blogs.  Yes I still buy them.

    I have no idea if blogs help sell music to college kids.  But they work for "old" men like me. 

    • CommentAuthorscottp4k
    • CommentTimeFeb 10th 2008
     
    vampire weekend sold a lot of records because everyone wrote about them. also, they're good. by comparison, someone like, say, bishop allen didn't sell many records.
    •  
      CommentAuthorSongbyToad
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    But they are not, I don't think, any better or worse than VW.  The difference?  Surely loads of people wrote about Bishop Allen too, or am I wide of the mark there?
    • CommentAuthorscottp4k
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008 edited
     
    only blogs wrote about bishop allen. vw are/were in lots of pubs - not just also in music mags but in the nyt, new yorker, gq, etc. and the amount of general online chatter about VW seems much, much higher than bishop allen who, again outside of a core of songsmith-focused indie blogs, didn't rate a blip to anyone else.
    •  
      CommentAuthorSongbyToad
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    True, there was barely a mention of them in most of the glossies over here. 
    •  
      CommentAuthormuruch
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    I don't think blogs make a huge impact on sells of well known artists unless it is a buzz band that everyone posts about, but there's definitely a difference when it comes to more obscure acts and albums. If I had a dollar for every Syreeta or "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement" CD bought through my blog, I'd be a rich woman. I don't, so I'm not, but oh well.
    •  
      CommentAuthorbond
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    scott and mpacks are dead-on.. bishop allen is a good example, and their first album still got a decent amount of coverage from NPR and 4 stars in rolling stone, but that's nowhere near the level of promo push that you're going to get from a label like XL.. blogs definitely broke vampire weekend, and probably helped get them signed, but the hype (and record sales) you're seeing now is coming through old-school channels.
    • CommentAuthorsquashed
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    I think blog wins hands down on delicate/small room recordings. They don't sound good on radio and doesn't fill stadium.  The usual magazine/radio are still about rock n' roll glitz, roaring stadium and Led Zeppelin power cord.

    Feist being the exception. Thank apple for that.
  16.  
    Interestingly two weeks ago, this was the story on Hypebot, "

    Is The Tipping Point Toast? Music Marketing Needs To Change...Again

    And here comes the NYU study saying, no, if you do get enough positive coverage from blogs, it does matter in sales.
  17.  
    Hmmm.  I usually want to kiss Scott on the mouth because he is so OTM, but I talked to someone at Dead Oceans the other day and he said Bishop Allen sold well and seemed pleased by its performance.  I think we have to look at how we define selling well, too.  I would kill for Bishop Allen's sales for my own band(s), but indie rock DOES sell these days (VW, Spoon, etc.) relative to everything else, so maybe expectations should be higher?

    Vampire Weekend, like Eric/Scott/others said, is everywhere.  It's crossed over out of the music press into the MSM with a vengeance.  Good job, Beggars!
    •  
      CommentAuthorbond
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    the original fast company article that the hypebot story links to makes some great points, i read it last week - clive thompson's really been doing some great writing lately for that otherwise-worthless magazine. particularly of note is the fact that the whole 'influentials' hypothesis that gladwell trumpets has been around in various forms for 50 yrs now, and w/ wildly varying degrees of success.
  19.  
    Lucas, BA numbers please, I'm very curious. I think I've pointed it out before, but that last Rosebuds record (Merge) sold (total) only around 7k, and they seem to have the support of every blog on the planet behind them. I was quite surprised to hear Mac talking about it in that David Byrne interview-- he seemed totally cool with those sort of numbers, even though, in my mind, I was under the impression that a label the size of Merge moving so few units wouldn't make for a sustainable business. Then again, they have the Arcade Fire and Spoon.....
    • CommentAuthorscottp4k
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008 edited
     
    BA sold a solid 1200-some in its first week-- I looked that up on filter blog yesterday after this thread, can't afford soundscan. And, yeah, that is impressive for that band but it's still a band's second LP (and like 14th release) selling like 21-22x less than another's debut LP (and second release). Online stuff, like bond says, seems to still work more as a tipsheet for larger media-- although frankly in this case, that wasn't even true. Dudes like Sanneh and SF-J and Xgau helped push VW forward right from the start.

    VW are perhaps a bad example for anything since they may have had the highest-charting first-week performance of any indie rock debut LP. (in the U.S. of course - in the UK indie bands can sell loads out of the gate)
  21.  
    By contrast, Elliott Smith's New Moon only sold like 20k the first week, which depresses me to no end. I guess it's not bad in 2007.
    •  
      CommentAuthormaura
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    vampire weekend was getting rolling stone coverage over the summer, when it was playing a free show at the east river music project! and the video for 'a-punk' got debuted on trl, for crying out loud. i don't think that their success can be chalked up to them having a lock on the elbo.ws chart's top spot (no offense, of course!).

    can i ask a serious question? has anyone making hay of this study actually *read* it beyond the abstract/press release? it has been sitting on my hard drive for the past two days, which is why i've been silent on it so far. but i mean ... considering that a lot of the 'blogs break bands' chatter has been emanating from ars technica/digg, i am especially wary of whatever spin is being, er, spun out. (although again i love that the ars/digg crowd is using record sales as a measure of success... sometimes i wonder if techies save all their logical impulses for their all-night coding sessions.)

    this has been your 'if your mother says she loves you, check it out' moment for the day.
    •  
      CommentAuthormaura
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    i mean for me the gist of the study seems to be 'bands that are popular topics of conversation are, in fact, popular,' implying a lot less change in terms of who's directing conversations and a lot more mixing of the traditional marketing-vs-people divide. not so much a radical shift in the balance of power as more of a mixing up of everyone. which, frankly, is pretty par for the course in today's world.
  24.  
    I tried reading the actual study, but it's been like over 10 years since I had stats in college and my teacher didn't talk English too well.
    • CommentAuthorscottp4k
    • CommentTimeFeb 11th 2008
     
    well, VW has inspired more out-of-the-gate conversation than any u.s. guitar band than the strokes, so in that sense...maybe it does matter
    • CommentAuthorsquashed
    • CommentTimeFeb 12th 2008 edited
     
    Posted by: maura
     has anyone making hay of this study actually *read* it beyond the abstract/press release? 

     

    No, I didn't even click the url until you ask that question. heh..
    anyway, here is the paper. I tried to read it. 

    http://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/23783

    Uhmm....I don't understand anything in there.

    From what the say:

    blog chatter = technorati
    sale = amazon ranking.

    Then they do their statistical do hickey...

    They find correlation ...no shit.  I bet I can find correlation between blog album buzz and sun spot cycles too. Of course there is spike correlation but how they can say blog drives sale or merely Buzz that create the spike?   How can they know if it's just "major artist" receiving a lot of pre-release buzz vs. "minor nobody" with no spike. What's the control there...?

    hmm.


  27.  
    i'll have more to say on this once i read this for the 3rd time.  but, this all is very similar to the correllation between ice cream sales and the homicide rate in NYC. 

    to be fair, the study does not say that blogs lead to sales.  in fact, they dispute that and call out any number of additional factors.  but in doing so, they really don't describe anything more than the typical awareness cycle for an album nowadays.  it opens the door for more investigation into what kind of consumer each form of media draws and what that impact is on sales.

    but, it's also full of crazily inane observations that makes me think these guys know nothing about the music industry and how you sell records.  among the many keens observations of this study:

    - "interestingly enough, almost all our our sampled albums came out on a Tuesday"
    - "volume with traditional media tends peaks when records are out, while the blogs peak before an album comes out"
    - "we excluded digital sales from the research"  (while many albums for indies are hitting a 40-50% rate of overall sales)
    - "albums by John Mellancamp and Catherine McPhee rewiewed poorly but sold well"

    i think all this study can do is open the door for someone to actually look at something meaningful correlating what media influences (or the media mix) for the right customers for labels to target.
  28.  
    Posted by: Dave RawkblogBy contrast, Elliott Smith's New Moon only sold like 20k the first week, which depresses me to no end. I guess it's not bad in 2007.

     That's not bad for a cobbled-together record from a dead guy on Kill Rock Stars, though admittedly it did come from the best era of his work.

    • CommentAuthorsquashed
    • CommentTimeFeb 12th 2008
     
    This is much more amusing information.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/08/02/12/2037223.shtml

    "A recent study finds that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. Worse news for advertisers: these clickers are not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject, according to the study. This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously."
  30.  
    Posted by: squashedThis is much more amusing information.

    http://slashdot.org/articles/08/02/12/2037223.shtml

    "A recent study finds that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. Worse news for advertisers: these clickers are not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject, according to the study. This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously."

    this is interesting but not surprising.  anyone who is concerned with clickthroughs and not using Google AdWords shouldn't have the job where they make such decisions.

    in terms of advertising, there is also just the idea of putting a message in front of an audience.  for years, TV ad sales people have sold a lot of ads not worrying about response rates by coming up with more ethereal metrics like "brand lift" to give advertisers something tangible other than true ROI.

    and besides, marketing people>  accountable? c'mon squashed.  not in this lifetime.

1 to 30 of 30

  1.