The Times: A Pop Chart for Web Era Challenges Billboard’s
Stefano Paltera/Associated Press
Billboard’s charts of albums and singles, published in their current form since the 1950s, are the last word in music rankings. But has the magazine’s methodology kept pace with changes in technology and music consumption?
This week BigChampagne, a company that tracks online media, announced the Ultimate Chart, a challenger that it says measures music’s popularity more fully by counting not only sales and airplay (as Billboard does) but also online streams and an array of social-networking services.
“We’re rewriting the top of the charts for the new music business and enlisting the help of its chief architects to surface the most popular music that the charts have overlooked,” Eric Garland, BigChampagne’s chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday after announcing the chart at the New Music Seminar industry conference in New York.
BigChampagne has long been the music industry’s go-to source for information about unauthorized file sharing. But the company has said that the Ultimate Chart will measure only legitimate services, like YouTube, MySpace, Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook.
