"In 2011, 76,875 albums were released and sold at least one copy in the US, according to stats shared by Nielsen Soundscan. These releases came from major and indie labels, as well as unsigned artists, as long as they were properly registered and set up with identifiers like UPC barcodes.
That group of 76,875 albums collectively went on to sell about 113 million copies in the US.
Of that total, sales of roughly 100 million, or 88.5%, came from just 1,500 releases, or 1.9% of the release total.
Which means that, roughly speaking, 2% of releases accounted for 90% of new release sales."
Source: DigitalMusicNews, 12th January 2012
Showing posts with label long-tail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label long-tail. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The 'half life' of a popular link shared on Twitter is 3 hours
"We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. For this link the half life was 70 minutes, which captures all the clicks between the grey lines on the graph above.
Let’s look at a second link - East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia - , this one first shared by the Washington Post on Twitter.
Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”
While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off. Noticeably though this link a half life of only 5 minutes: after 5 minutes this link had seen half of the clicks it would ever see.
This link is associated with a very timely event (an earthquake on the US East Coast) as opposed to the previous link (pictures of otters and kittens are clearly interesting all the time). We think that this difference in content drives the difference in dynamics of these two links. However, one alternative theory that comes up again and again is that the dynamics of the link traffic depend on where the link is posted: do links posted on facebook last longer than they do on twitter?
So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter."
Let’s look at a second link - East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia - , this one first shared by the Washington Post on Twitter.
Rate of clicks per minute on “East Coast earthquake: 5.8 magnitude epicenter hits Virginia”
While the exact details of the traffic are a little different, and the scale of the traffic to this link is much larger, we see essentially the same pattern: a fast rise, and a more relaxed drop-off. Noticeably though this link a half life of only 5 minutes: after 5 minutes this link had seen half of the clicks it would ever see.
This link is associated with a very timely event (an earthquake on the US East Coast) as opposed to the previous link (pictures of otters and kittens are clearly interesting all the time). We think that this difference in content drives the difference in dynamics of these two links. However, one alternative theory that comes up again and again is that the dynamics of the link traffic depend on where the link is posted: do links posted on facebook last longer than they do on twitter?
So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar. The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter."
Source: Analysis by Bitly, reported on their blog, 6th September 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
81.7% of new album sales in the US come from just 1% of new release titles
"An incredible 81.7% of new album sales come from just 1% of new release titles, according to details released by Nielsen Soundscan on Wednesday morning. "It's ridiculous," commented Nielsen executive David Bakula during the presentation at Canadian Music Week in Toronto.
But it's been that way for years, at least in the US. According to the same Nielsen dataset, the top 1% accounted for 83.3% of new album sales in 2009, and 82.8% in 2008. And, the figure was just shy of 80% in 2005, 2006, and 2007."
But it's been that way for years, at least in the US. According to the same Nielsen dataset, the top 1% accounted for 83.3% of new album sales in 2009, and 82.8% in 2008. And, the figure was just shy of 80% in 2005, 2006, and 2007."
Monday, October 18, 2010
Just under one third of US digital music downloads come from just 50 songs
"On 6/27/10, the 2010 YTD Digital Tracks Current chart showed the Top 50 songs totaled 69,608,330.
On 6/27/10, the National Sales Summary (Track) chart showed that YTD, there were 231,863,000 current tracks sold YTD."
Source: Data from Nielsen Soundscan, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 7th October 2010
On 6/27/10, the National Sales Summary (Track) chart showed that YTD, there were 231,863,000 current tracks sold YTD."
Source: Data from Nielsen Soundscan, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 7th October 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The long tail of video sites in the US account for 52% of all time spent watching video
Click to enlargeThe Nos. 2 through 25 sites account for the remaining 22 percent of video minutes. This group includes No. 2 video site Hulu, which just hit 1 billion monthly video streams in December, and fast-rising Netflix (no. 19). Hulu’s 1 billion streams accounted for 5.8 billion minutes of viewing time, up 140 percent from a year before."
Source: comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, reported by Techcrunch, 8th February 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Only 12 'new' artists (without major label support) sold more than 10,000 copies of an album in the US in 2008
"Looking at the 1517 albums that were released in 2008 and sold more than 10,000 units in 2008 we find that only 225 of them were by artists that had surpassed 10,000 for the first time in their career (either by themselves or with another band).
The vast majority of these were released by significant indies (110) or majors (103). Last Friday, I thought that only 14 of those were self released artists or artists on start up labels. Further inspection disqualified two of them. One was a gospel record whose Bishop had exceeded 10,000 in the past under a slightly different name and the other was a Soundscan placeholder for a title distributed by Anderson Wholesale, the distributor for Walmart, that showed the title “TBD.” We had thought it was a Dutch electronic artist called Anderson but alas, nay.
Who were these valiant artists? A quick inspections indicated that beyond Bon Iver, the real indie artist success story of 2008, there were three hip hop artists, one that had financing of $10 a unit in marketing spend to sell under 30,000 units, another associated with the big indie hip hop powerhouse Tech N9ne and the last a gospel hip hop artist. The rest were largely alternative rock artists, two had been contestants in America’s Got Talent or American Idol and a few others were on small labels with big budgets."
Source: Musicial Coaching, 20th January 2010 (which also lists the 12 artists)
Update - 22nd Janaury 2010 - These figures and the conclusions are being disputed on the grounds that:
1 - Tracks are a better measure than albums
2 - Not all tracks or albums are registered with Nielsen Soundscan
The vast majority of these were released by significant indies (110) or majors (103). Last Friday, I thought that only 14 of those were self released artists or artists on start up labels. Further inspection disqualified two of them. One was a gospel record whose Bishop had exceeded 10,000 in the past under a slightly different name and the other was a Soundscan placeholder for a title distributed by Anderson Wholesale, the distributor for Walmart, that showed the title “TBD.” We had thought it was a Dutch electronic artist called Anderson but alas, nay.
Who were these valiant artists? A quick inspections indicated that beyond Bon Iver, the real indie artist success story of 2008, there were three hip hop artists, one that had financing of $10 a unit in marketing spend to sell under 30,000 units, another associated with the big indie hip hop powerhouse Tech N9ne and the last a gospel hip hop artist. The rest were largely alternative rock artists, two had been contestants in America’s Got Talent or American Idol and a few others were on small labels with big budgets."
Source: Musicial Coaching, 20th January 2010 (which also lists the 12 artists)
Update - 22nd Janaury 2010 - These figures and the conclusions are being disputed on the grounds that:
1 - Tracks are a better measure than albums
2 - Not all tracks or albums are registered with Nielsen Soundscan
Monday, November 30, 2009
77% of Facebook fan pages have fewer than 1,000 fans
Click to enlarge65% of pages have more than 100 fans
23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans
4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans
0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans
0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total)."
Source: Data from Sysomos, reported by Techcrunch, 28th November 2009
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Only 20% of iPhone Apps are actively used
"Today the App Store has passed the 100k apps available on the App Store (sept was officially announced 85k). This is a great news and the pace keeps growing.
But there is a bad news. Very few apps are enjoying the ride.
We have found out that actually 20k apps are actually used (meaning installed and kept on people's iPhone). This number may grow with our user base, but it is a clear indicator that only 20% of all apps are actually raising interest.
The second number which is more dramatic is that there is a very very very long tail of apps: The graph below gives you an indication of the rank of each app we scan (based on the number of installation) and the % of users that own them.
Click to expand
A very little number of apps makes it above 50% of iphone owners (easy to guess which one: facebook, shazam,...) it goes down VERY fast. The app rank 1000 is owned by less than 2% of the iPhone owners (1.76%) and it goes down very fast also."
Source: Blog post by AppsFire, 27th October 2009
But there is a bad news. Very few apps are enjoying the ride.
We have found out that actually 20k apps are actually used (meaning installed and kept on people's iPhone). This number may grow with our user base, but it is a clear indicator that only 20% of all apps are actually raising interest.
The second number which is more dramatic is that there is a very very very long tail of apps: The graph below gives you an indication of the rank of each app we scan (based on the number of installation) and the % of users that own them.
Click to expandSource: Blog post by AppsFire, 27th October 2009
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