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FUTUREHIT 2011 YEAR END REPORT INFOGRAPHIC

by on January 20, 2012 in Uncategorized

As I do at the end of each year, we take the Top 100 selling songs of the previous year and look for patterns on what’s making a song a hit.  Some of our findings for this year:

  • The average length of a song intro continues to be 7.1 seconds long
  • 71% of the intros in 2011 were under 10 seconds long
  • Over 1 out of 4 intros were zero seconds long
  • The average tempo for a song was 101 BPM
  • Despite feeling like the charts are beat driven, 54% of the top sellers were 100 BPM or less

Rather than write a lot of words, I figured it’s best to show you the rest in a very snazzy infographic, courtesy of my new friends at Killer Infographics. Enjoy!

OH BABY, HOW MARKETING PLANS HAVE CHANGED

by on November 23, 2011 in Uncategorized

The music business has changed in so many ways over the last few decades, but how much has it changed?  Sometimes it’s good to look back just to see how far things have come in the last few years.

As I was cleaning up around the house, I stumbled across an old promo item from U2 that I had from many years back.  It was a Solicitation Kit to convince retailers to stock their then-new Achtung Baby album on store shelves.  With all the recent hype around the album’s 20th anniversary, I cracked it open to remind myself of the kit’s contents.  Inside, it contained an advanced cassette of several songs, a video tape, and of the greatest interest here, the original marketing plan.  There’s nothing inherently controversial in what was done to market the album 20 years ago, but there is a lot of interesting tidbits that show how much marketing has changed in the last 20 years, including:

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IT’S NOT SPOTIFY’S FAULT YOU MAKE SO LITTLE MONEY

by on September 21, 2011 in Uncategorized

In the last few days, chatter has grown in the indie community about pulling releases from the new (to the U.S.) music subscription service Spotify. The complaints largely stem from miniscule royalty checks at lower rates than majors receive. Spotify has responded to the complaints but that only seems to add fuel to the fire. What is the real issue?

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PANDORA AND SPOTIFY ARE NOT COMPETITORS

by on August 30, 2011 in Uncategorized

Last week, Pandora announced their first post-IPO earnings report. They did post a loss, but they had higher revenue than Wall Street expected. This was not only good news for Wall Street, but also for artists and labels who get royalties from Pandora airplay.

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THE FUTUREHIT 2011 MIDYEAR REPORT

by on July 7, 2011 in Uncategorized

It’s halfway thru 2011 and time to make my 2nd annual midyear report. This report defines a hit as a song that has sold the most downloads. I look at the Top 50 biggest selling downloads in the US as a group. This year, these Top 50 downloads accounted for nearly 89 million downloads (and nearly $115 million in gross revenue). Once again, about 1 out of every 3 paid downloads of a new song came from this list of 50 titles. The exact figure is 32.9%, which is an increase over the 32.3% from last year. In fact, having a hit is becoming increasingly important. While the overall download market has increased 11% so far over 2010, the Top 50 downloads have increased in sales at a faster rate (by 15%). The #1 selling single for the year so far is Katy Perry’s “E.T.” with 4.1 million downloads sold. That’s a 22% increase over last year’s #1 song at this time. Also, for the first time, every single title in the Top 50 downloads has sold platinum in the last 6 months.

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DO YOU HAVE KLOUT? YOU SHOULD!

by on May 24, 2011 in Uncategorized

http://klout.com/

What exactly is Klout? Klout measures your overall online influence on a scale of 1 to 100. It looks at Twitter, Facebook and the like and examines several factors. It looks at your True Reach, or how big is your engaged audience. It looks at Amplification Probability, or how likely a person on your audience will click your link. It also looks at your Network Influence, such as how often you get retweeted. All told, it can measure exactly how influential you are.

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DIGITAL DOWNLOADS STILL KEY FOR FUTUREHITS

by on May 23, 2011 in Uncategorized

Have you ever moved 12.5 million units of anything? Music? Dollars? Grains of rice? Almost certainly not. Do you agree that this is a lot and if you were to move this many units in music, it’s a good success, right?

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HOW NARCISSISTIC ARE YOUR LYRICS?

by on April 26, 2011 in Uncategorized

Last year I did an mid-year analysis of the top 50 selling songs of 2010 thus far. I found that there was an increased use of the word “I” (and its derivatives) in relation to “you”. In fact, the variations of “I” were used nearly twice as much as the variations of “you”. I didn’t really have any historical data to back up whether or not this was an increasing trend or this was somewhat normal. A couple of pop music people I talked to suggested that this was the relative standard for the past few years.

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DIGITAL OLIGOPOLY & SUGGESTIONS ON BREAKING IT

by on March 27, 2011 in Uncategorized

This week, the UK-based AIM (Association of Independent Music) announced that their members receive over 94% of their digital revenue from 3 outlets: iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. The story, first reported in Music Week and then in Digital Music News and MusicAlly, highlights that 51 other companies are splitting the remaining 5.6%. AIM CEO Alison Wenham is not looking at this positively as she tells Music Week, “There are now a series of monopolies and it is jolly hard for anyone else to get a slice of the market.”

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REBECCA BLACK: WINNERS AND LOSERS

by on March 20, 2011 in Uncategorized

A week ago, I certainly didn’t intend to write (or obsess) so much about Rebecca Black and her viral internet meme “Friday”. However, there is so so much to learn from this track. In one week, this song basically upended the music business conversation. What are the results of this?

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