The New TuneCore Charts by Jeff Price
Today TuneCore launched two TuneCore charts
The TuneCore Top 20 Artist Chart
The TuneCore Top 20 Songs Chart
The charts are compiled from the iTunes daily trend reports. As we get more daily sales information from additional stores, we will include these sales numbers in the charts.
The TuneCore Top 20 Artist Chart adds together the number of albums, ringtones and singles sold to come up with the ranking
The TuneCore Top 20 Song Chart lists the best selling individual songs.
These charts will be updated weekly
In addition, over the next few weeks we will be adding additional features to the charts – for example, on the Top 20 Artist Chart, when the Artist name is clicked on it will show the titles and release date of each album, single or ringtone. When the release title is clicked on, it will provide a track listing. Next to each release title will be a link to buy at iTunes
With the launch of these charts, I also wanted to provide the world a perspective on the legitimacy and importance of TuneCore Artists (and by extension all Artists). There is more music selling by more artists now than at any time in history. Music sales by unit are up, not down (RIAA, IFPI and Nielsen data also state this)
Many TuneCore Artists are outselling and/or are making more money than “signed” Artists. This is a testament to their music. When you add access to digital stores and media outlets (like YouTube) and combine it with social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and mass communication social networking technologies like Twitter, Artists can, and are, selling hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions, of songs across their catalog of work.
Here is some hard data just from TuneCore Artists
In 2009, TuneCore Artists were paid for the download or stream of over 65 million songs and albums over all stores TuneCore works with generating over $35 million in gross music sales
From these 65 million units, TuneCore Artists sold:
- 26,230,308 songs, or about 40% all sales
- 1,470,502 albums, or about 2.3% of all sales
- 37,475,907 streams, or about 57% of all sales
By Genre, Rock was king for paid album downloads selling 16% of all digital album sales, followed by Alternative (13.5%) and then HipHop (12.2%)
Rock dominated even more for paid song downloads selling 23% of all digital song sales, followed by Alternative (18%) and then Pop (12.5%)