Posted on February 10th, 2008 by The Rock Star Stories.
Categories: Music, Schools, Trends.
New York University’s Stern Business School’s Professor Vasant Dhar and Elaine Chang, a former student, have released the results of a study that proves online word-of-mouth can be used as a good predictor of a music albums sales numbers.
Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica said yesterday that the researchers couldn’t afford the record sales reports from Nielsen SoundScan, so they instead turned to the best indicator of all sales they could find online: Amazon sales ranks.
They monitored what was being said on blogs, and also how many friends the band(s) had on MySpace. They did this for 108 albums at the beginning of 2007, and followed a mixture of independent releases as well as those from the big four record labels.
They did find that the more friends an artist’s MySpace account had, the higher the album sales. As for blog posts, if an independent release got at least 40 blog posts from everyday people, they saw sales at three times the normal.
For the big four labels, 40 blog posts would show a five-fold sales increase, but to get to a six-fold increase, it took 250 or more blog posts.
The Web is a natural facilitator of word-of-mouth.
The more a product is in front of a consumer, the higher the sales.
0 comments.
Comments can contain some xhtml. Names and emails are required (emails aren't displayed), url's are optional.
Join Email List
