How people use Nielsen to hurt musicians.

I read an article today at Digital Music News about comments by Tommy Silverman - founder of Tommy Boy and the New Music Seminar.

With all due respect, his information is wrong.  But worse, the conclusions he reaches from this faulty information could be damaging to artists.

Some highlights include statements like:

Silverman counted 105,575 new album releases that year, and found that just 225 of those were new artists surpassing the 10,000 unit threshold for the first time.  Of that, just 14 were do-it-yourself artists, unaffiliated with a major, indie, or other entity."

and

"What does this say about the Chris Anderson 'Long Tail' promise?" Silverman blogged in Musician Coaching.  "Clearly the ease of making and distributing music does not benefit 'breaking' music.  Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both.  I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history.  Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it.  I know this is a bold statement but it is true."

I wrote a response to the editor of the blog where the article appeared, I do not know if he will post it, but I feel so strongly about making certain word gets out, I am re-posting my response to Tommy's statements here

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I hope this email finds you well.  I am writing you in response to Tommy's information and posting - the good news, he is dead wrong. The truth is more artists and bands are breaking now in America, and around the world, than at any other time in history. Technology has absolutly helped more great artists and bands rise to the top.

The Nielsen data cited is not only incomplete, but also provides a false analysis.

Let me provide you some hard stats to back this up:

According to Nielsen and Tommy  there were:
"...106,000 new (music) releases in 2008"

In 2008, TuneCore released approximately 90,000 newly recorded releases

This means, according to Nielsen and Tommy, almost every single new music release in 2008 was distributed via TuneCore.

I know this simply not to be true - the base assumption that Tommy is making is as dead wrong as his other statistics.

Another example, Tommy states:

" just 225 of those (the new releases) were new artists surpassing the 10,000 unit threshold for the first time. "

This is an empirically false statement for a few reasons.

First, in order for Nielsen to accuratly track sales, the UPCs for those albums must be pre-registered in their database.  If the UPC is not registered in its database, Nielsen can not match the sales data to an album (or song). For example, if a digital store tells Nielsen it sold 100 copies of UPC # 123456789, and Nielsen has no idea what UPC # 123456789 is, it can not report the sales.

Next, the majority of the 90,000 releases via TuneCore in 2009 were not registered with Soundscan therefore making it impossible for them to track or report on the sales.

But these two points are actually kind of moot.  Music is no longer bought by the album, it is bought by the song across an artist's catalog.  Tracking album sales as the sole indicator to determine if something is "breaking" is analogous to tracking only vinyl album sales to determine if something is "breaking"

Some examples:

When they were unsigned, the following TuneCore artists sold the following quantities of songs across their releases:

Kelly sold over 2,000,000 million tracks
William Fitzsimmons sold over 150,000 tracks
Soulja Boy sold over 200,000 tracks
Boyce Avenue sold over 1,200,000 tracks
Ron Pope sold over 250,000 tracks
Colt Ford sold over 300,000 tracks
Secondhand Serenade sold over 250,000 tracks
Tapes N Tapes sold over 200,000 tracks
Nevershoutnever sold over 1,000,000 tracks
Drake sold over 300,000 tracks
MGMT sold over 225,000 tracks
The Medic Droid sold over 150,00 tracks
Nickasaur sold over 150,000 tracks
Harry and the Potters sold over 200,000 tracks

This is just a very quick partial list that goes on and on and on

Under Tommy's model, none of these artist sales count as they are not "album" sales.

With all due respect, Tommy might discount selling over 1,000,000 songs by an "unsigned" artist as not "breaking", but I do.

On a macro level, in 2009 alone, the internet allowed the "long tail" unsigned artists that used TuneCore to generate over $32,000,000 in music sales by selling over 42,000,000 songs - this is more than one song a second selling by a TuneCore Artist on iTunes.  This "long tail" catalog that TuneCore's Aritsts represent is now one of the most valuable music catalogs in the world. And this all happened due to the net, social networking and access to the media outlets (like YouTube).

"Breaking" is not just about selling albums or even just the music - it is about generating revenue off of fame.  This is done via merch, gig, publishing, music sales, ad revenue and more.  Nevershoutnever sold over 35,000 t-shirts in a number of months via a regional sales program with Hot Topic. Surely Tommy does not mean to discount these sales and revenue simply because the artist is selling merch?  How about if the band sold no music but consistently sold out 1,000 venue clubs and made $15,000 a night?  Why does Tommy discredit bands for their success if they are not selling "albums"?

Another distributing and incorrect point suggested by Tommy is that music sales are down due to the fact that there is more music available to buy, share and discover.

As a matter of fact, its quite the opposite

In the late 90's - also known as the "golden age" of market share and revenue for the music industry - more music was being released and bought than ever before (as an example, Warner was releasing one new release a day). Despite this increase of releases, sales (not just revenue) went up, not down.

Or from a pure logic perspective, if iTunes had 2,000,000 less songs, would an artist that is not selling now as no one likes their music magically start selling.  Or to flip it around, I would suggest more music on the virtual shelf causes more music to sell as it allows the music buyer to discover music via the digital stores own recommendation association engines.

Tommy's goes on to state:

"Breaking music requires mass exposure which requires luck or money or both."

This statement is also dead wrong - and he knows it based on is own experiences at Tommy Boy.

Historically, in the music industry, 98% of what the record labels distributed, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on to market and promote and get played on commercial radio and MTV did not "break".  If "breaking" simply "required mass exposure", there would have been a 98% success rate, not failure rate. But music is not a math equation, and therein lies the problem with Tommy's statement.  Yes, to break you need exposure, but that by no means guarantees success.  The music has to cause reaction. For example, if "Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not a song that people liked, it would not have mattered how much money was spent on getting you to hear it.

And that's the excitement and beauty of the internet.  The masses now have direct access to the media and "music discovery" social networking outlets. - i.e. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Jango and more. These new social networking and media vehicles allow mass communication in an instanteous fashion at a click of button. Suddenly one person's opinion does matter and can can impact a bottom line.  Even the digital stores themselves provide a vehicle to market and promote yourself off off (i.e. iTunes iMixes or recommendations of other music to buy).   Through these vehicles the internet has delivered the ability for anyone to "break", and they actually are.  The masses now have access to the media outlets to get heard. The problem is the old school view that  "breaking" is simply defined by selling albums.  This could not be farther from the truth.

Tommy also goes onto say:

"I can say with great authority that less new music is breaking now in America than any other time in history.  Technology has not helped more great music rise to the top, it has inhibited it.  I know this is a bold statement but it is true."

It might be a bold statement by Tommy to help get headlines, but it's also false (and kind of silly). The truth is more artists and bands are breaking now in America, and around the world, than at any other time in history. Technology has absolutly helped more great artists and bands rise to the top.

The distressing part for me about this is based on Tommy's statements,  if an artists' release is not counted by Nielsen than it is not actually released.  If music does not sell as an album then it has not sold. In effect, he is de-legitimizing artists.

With all due respect, I believe an artist's release should "count" even if not recognized by Nielsen as this de-recognition closes off possible opportunities based on the perception that a release is not "real"

I also find it distressing that the media, and other outlets, turn to Nielsen as the definitive source to determine what is occurring in this industry thereby decreasing the opportunities for musicians and artists that are not part of this old school system.

The reality is the majority of music is now being created, released and sold outside of the traditional system. Ad agencies, music supervisors, video game manufacturers, radio programmers etc turn to Nielsen for information to discover music in an attempt to use/license it. They need to understand that the Nielsen information is an incomplete and an inaccurate portrayal of reality. This inaccurate perception is holding back opportunity and validation for others.  Tommy needs to stop propagating this false perception as it hurts artists.

It's important that an accurate picture of what is occurring be presented to fans and businesses to provide additional choice and opportunity for musicians.  They work hard enough as it is, the last thing we need to do is propagate a false reality to hurt them.  Tommy's heart is in the right place, we are here to help musicians, but let's start with a more accurate description as opposed to a "bold" but false statement that helps promote an agenda.

Comments

[Robert Watson]

I haven't sold anything so far on Tunecore. I am wondering how do I market myself. I play psychedelic-experiemental instrumental rock music. I am just asking.

[Snfu Bar]

If the album is no longer the measure of sales for "breaking" which it might not be... than just divide songs sales by 12 (the average amount of songs on a CD) to come up with an "album equivalent" number to compare old to new.

Example Artist X has sold 24,000 paid SONG downloads - well, easy that = 2,000 ALBUMS...

so to break Silverman's threshold, artists need to sell a minimum of 120,000 paid SONG downloads to make it past the goal line...

[Adam D.]

To put my last comment into concrete terms, because Jeff wrote about 2 of the top 14 best-sellers on Tune Core and the relevance of Billboard in a post dated to July 2, 2009--more than six months before this one! And I am sure that we have NOT heard the last of it, in ALL its variations.

I stratified the top 14 best-sellers. Take the median (there isn't a true "middle," so . . . ) the number of sales is 225,000 units, taking the lower number to limit the disparity of sales. As one comment said, selling 10,000 units is 4.4%. Or put another way, 225,000 is more than 20 times that amount!

This leaves LOTS of room for range-y sales figures among artists selling in those unit marks. With no way of giving context to how realistic it is to sell 10,000 units among 90,000 artists, exaggerated hyperboles aside.

Still, 10,000 units comes nowhere near 225,000. The sales are so range-y that even among the top artists the top 3 nearly doubled the other 11, demonstrating my concept of a steep cutoff.

Merely considering the ratio of top bands AND their sales vis-a-vis the whole community, they are fewer than two-hundredths of 1% of the TC community. Need I lay out a feudal ethnography? To take Kieran's figure that 98% might sell 50 units per title, what you have to do to reach the 10,000 units mark is to post 200 songs!! To lend perspective that will cost you up front $2,000 of your $5,000 profit. Who has 200 resale-ready songs?

Bottom line: if you do NOT report UPCs to Nielsen and do NOT sell the units to have leverage why do you care what Nielsen does? I promise that the top 14 artists are doing fine and legitimized. You have to sell more units to win. That is the more important question TC can address. Promoting artists can help. However buying a review or sales charts is useless when you can solicit FREE reviews to be posted FOR FREE to a forum YOUR FANS follow, by a critic respected in your genre. Make reasonable demands.

Although I do not begrudge the success of the best-sellers, I refuse to allow spurious arguments to distress me if they do not affect my sales!

[Adam D.]

To Kieran,

Actually, the top 14 sold 6,575,000. It doesn't change much, but it skews the numbers further against the other Tune Core artists.

I bet if you took the top 100 best-sellers you'd find everybody else releasing thru Tune Core is making less than a day's pay per year. At least, at some point you would get a big drop in the total sales per artist well before the median, as that cutoff to come AT the median would mean one or two more songs per artist (IF that) in a sample size of 90,000. Very informative math, Kieran.

[Kieran Kelly]

We should do a little math to get to the main "spirit" of Silvermans argument. I am going to take numbers straight from Jeff's post

Top 14 selling tunecore artists sold
6,375,000 Tracks.

Tunecore artists overall sold ( this number would include titles from 2007 so pushing the over all per title sales down . Thus the number would be LOWER than even what I am posting )
42,000,000 Tracks . Subtract the 6,375,000 tracks that the top 14 artists that leaves you with

35,625,000 tracks sold for the other 90,000+ new and catalog titles.

Titles published in 2008
90,000

Taking out those 14 Titles
The AVERAGE tracks sold in 2008 of every other title on tunecore was
395 tracks sold( 39.5 total albums sold )

for a average title gross of
$277 dollars per year. for all but the top 14 Artists

Keep in mind that was only separating the top 14 selling artists from tunecore from the general pool .. what about separating the top 1000 titles .. I bet at that point the average per title track sales of the bottom 89,000 titles ( thats the other 98% for those keeping track) would be below well below 50 tracks sold per year average.

Silverman's Point is still valid even if the numbers are a little off. If anything it would further support the need for a team. As Almost all ( if not all ) of the top selling artists report to Nielsen . Where as the lowest selling releases would skew that ratio even lower than the $277 per title gross above
__________

[Chip]

Jeff,
You said:
"That being said, Neilsen takes other entities data (the labels, the artists, the retail stores, the distributors) adds value to it and then with no permission or ask from the artist or labels sells it - however, they keep all the revenue."

This describes Google's exact business model. Crawl sites, take data, repackage it and make tons of money from using it or selling it to others. I figured you be against Google as well, based on the rant, but I know that you run Google advertising for Tunecore, I've seen the ads.

Why is it that you support Google with your $$s, but pan Nielsen for doing having the exact same model?

I'm not looking for a fight, just a clarification on your rationale. I can't seem to reconcile what you are saying and what Tuncore is doing.

wrg to you comment about putting TC's 'ownership' on content, isn't there a way to pass the data to Nielsen without claiming ownership over it?

[Shinobi]

Jeff, the funniest or most ironic is that he asked for more data for an interview. I'm sorry he must mistake himself for a legitimate media outlet.

Maybe he should focus on the fact that he is lagging in "media credentials" that couldn't get him in to a Tone Loc concert.

NEXT!

[JeffCore]

TO CHIP:

I believe its inappropriate for TuneCore to claim artists as "TuneCore's" and claim market share. However, any artist can register their UPCs with Soundscan if they like - they then get the credit (after all they are also the "label") That being said, Neilsen takes other entities data (the labels, the artists, the retail stores, the distributors) adds value to it and then with no permission or ask from the artist or labels sells it - however, they keep all the revenue. At the very least, in my opinion, they should be sharing some portion of that revenue back with the entities that created the thing they are selling - this includes the artists. Finally, Soundscan has little relevancy these days - most of TuneCore's customers are not going for commercial radio play, physical shelf space or MTV play. And the Billboard charts (created from Soundscan's data) no longer accurately reflect the reality of the music business And to get on my little soapbox, I believe Soundscan needs the artists data more then they will need them. I am not in business to help and bolster Neilsen's marketshare on data that they can package and resell.

[Chip]

Why doesn't TuneCore just report the sales to Nielsen? Problem solved, no?

[Bernadette Mcgee]

Tommy feels that independant artist is getting a better break through in the industry.Good statement Jeff you made your point To Tommy and the rest of Artist pimmpers This is 2010 the pimp game in the industry has been aknowledge from some time now.So dont hate congradulate.

[Scott]

Thanks Jeff say good luck To Tommy Boy his eyes of tears of money is cry for more power...........

[Tommy Riley]

TOMMY SLIVERMAN IS AFRAID THAT HE WONT BE ABLE TO DECLARE WHO MAKES IN THE MUSIC BUSINESS ANY MORE . WE AS INDEPENDENT SINGERS, RAPERS , AND PRODUCERS CAN FINALLY SAY WE DON'T NEED YOUR (PIMP) CONTRACTS IN WHICH THE RECORD COMPANY MAKES MILLIONS AND WE MAKE PENNY'S . WE OWN OUR MUSIC, THE PEOPLE! DECLARE IF WE MAKE IT OR NOT, NOT SOME RADIO STATION THAT HAS BEEN PAID FOR BY SOME RECORD COMPANY . I guess the truth is scary for him , as for me (TOMMY RILEY) the truth shall set me free.
thank you for reading .... P.s my album is out now please tell me what you think

EMusic.com/album/Tommy-Riley-Trade-MP3-Download/11773107.html

[MandownIP]

I appreciate Tommy's statement's, it let me know that the mainstream music industry is trying to discredit the growning competition! I also appreciate Jeff's point-by-point counter but would like to have average statistically data instead of top sellers. To me he's placing the emphasis on the wrong segment of the market too, "that's too much like the big boys." How about telling us the medium sells for a Tunecore distribute artist and the likelihood of them doing 1000 - 10,000 units. Those numbers aren't career changing numbers, but net $500 - $5,000 would make many artist proud, as well as, put a little butter on their bread.

[amir]

the truth of the matter is that Nielsen Rating has absolutely no place in this day and age. It is an out dated tool.

[Vincent]

The problem with Myspace, Facebook, etc... is that a band or artist with little real talent can mix with those who have intense talent. This can make the "layperson" or young impressionable person believe the intense talent is lacking. In other words, what can the "layperson" go by?

I hope in the future most music we hear is real music with real talent. The ones who create and are happy to "make a living". Not the ones who try for easy street by playing substanceless crap.