Ten Major Billboard Music Records

Fun site Mental Floss had this recent Top 10 article:
1. Most weeks on the chart: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, 741 weeks. 741 WEEKS. That’s more than 14 years! Color me impressed, Heather. No other artist or album has even come close to that achievement – the closest was Johnny Mathis’ Johnny’s Greatest Hits, which spent 490 weeks (almost 9.5 years) on the charts.
2. The most top-ten albums: The Rolling Stones with 36 albums, followed by Frank Sinatra at 32 and The Beatles at 31.
3. The most number-one albums: The Beatles with 19, followed by Elvis and Jay-Z with 10 each. Tied for third are The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen with nine each. Fourth place is another tie: Barbra Streisand and Garth Brooks both have eight.
4. The biggest chart jump: Life After Death by The Notorious B.I.G., #176 to #1. This is really no surprise – the album was released posthumously just 16 days after his death in 1997. Other huge leaps include Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy, from #173 to #1; Radiohead’s In Rainbows, from #156 to #1; and somewhat surprisingly, The Monkees’ More of the Monkees, from #122 to #1. And another quick fact about Vitalogy – it originally charted at#55, and that was actual vinyl album sales, not CDs. It was the first vinyl album to chart at all since CDs entered the market.
5. The biggest chart drop: Light Grenades by Incubus, from #1 to #40. This just happened in 2006 and broke the previous record held by Marilyn Manson’s The Golden Age of Grotesque, which dropped from #1 to #21 in 2003. Other plummets include Young Jeezy’s The Inspiration, falling from #1 to #18 and Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, which fell from #1 to #16. You can see that Incubus holds the record pretty handily.
6. The only artist to ever have four number one albums in the same year: The Monkees. They even topped ever-present bands The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which is pretty astounding. The year was 1967 and the albums were The Monkees (released in 1966 but still #1 on the charts in 1967), More of the Monkees, Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd. . Their two album releases in 1968 only managed #3 and #45, 1969′s efforts landed them at #32 and #100, and it only got worse from then on out. It must hurt to fall so hard, so fast!
7. The first rap/hip-hop album to hit #1: Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys. It was 1987. Kind of ironically, it only made it to #2 on the actual Hip Hop/R&B chart.
8. First artist to hold the #1 and #2 spots: Bob Newhart. Yep, that’s right. In the ’60s, Bob’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart and its sequel, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back held both spots, beating both Elvis and The Sound of Music soundtrack. The subtitle of the first album is “The Most Celebrated New Comedian Since Attila the Hun.” That first album garnered him three Grammys in 1961: Best New Artist, Best Comedy Performance (Spoken Word) and Album of the Year. But back to the #1 and #2 spots on the Billboard Charts thing: the only artists to ever do the same are Guns ‘n’ Roses in 1991 with Use Your Illusion I and II, and Nelly in 2004 with Suit and Sweat.
9. The most weeks on the top ten: Music for Lovers Only by Jackie Gleason at 153 weeks. Surprising, no? That’s almost double the length of time Thriller spent in the top ten: 78 weeks.
10. Longest time for an album to make it to #1: Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl, 64 weeks. Yep, Paula’s album was on the charts for more than a year before it finally gained enough steam to take the #1 position. But she did really well on the singles chart – the album contained four #1 hits, which ties her for second place for the most songs to hit #1 from one single album. The singles were “Straight Up,” “Forever Your Girl,” “Cold Hearted” and “Opposites Attract.” The number-one spot goes to Michael Jackson’s Bad album, which had five #1 singles: I Just Can’t Stop Loving You, Bad, The Way You Make Me Feel, Man in the Mirror and Dirty Diana.

Music Royalties: Am I Helping My Favorite Bands?

I have been using Rhapsody, from Real Networks for about a couple of years now, and began to wonder if I've been shortchanging my favorite bands of their hard earned dough. Rhapsody allows me to listen to pretty much anything I want all day for $9.99 per month. I don't get to download the music like Itunes listeners do, and that's OK. still, I wondered how much does Porcupine Tree get paid when I listen to "your blackest eyes?" it turns out that royalty models are varied and meager. in most instances, the band gets paid between one half of a penny to three cents per stream of a song.....

My research led me to one web site that was analyzing new ways to pay bands for their efforts:

Let's take a look at a specific example, Synchronicity, the final studio album by the Police, released in 1983. According to Last.fm, the online music community and listener-tracking site, 68,247 members have listened to the Police recently and tracks from Synchronicity have been spun 44,624 times. (No doubt a very small percentage of total listeners worldwide, but it's probably safe to assume that their collective listening habits mirror the total audience for the band.) As you might guess, the hit single "Every Breath You Take" is the most-listened to song on the album, accounting for 14,281 recent listens by Last.fm members. And "Mother," guitarist Andy Summer's sole songwriting contribution to the disc is the least popular with just 1,154 listens (sorry, Andy).

Multiply $9.99 by each song's percentage of total plays for all of the songs on the album and you get a price list that looks like this:

Synchronicity, the Police, Priced By Listening Habits

Song	Price $
Every Breath You Take	3.20
King of Pain	1.67
Wrapped Around Your Finger	1.41
Synchronicity II	0.90
Tea in the Sahara	0.80
Synchronicity I	0.41
Murder by Numbers	0.35
Walking in Your Footsteps	0.35
O My God	0.33
Miss Gradenko	0.32
Mother	0.26

Based on Last.fm listening statistics as of 1/26/2006

This isn't going to work. The first big problem is that the $3.20 price for "Every Breath You Take" would be unpalatable to consumers (and very likely to drive customers who would've paid 99 cents for the song straight to a file-sharing service). Also, it exceeds any price the major labels would consider for a single-song download. And for a band that was truly a one hit wonder, a single song might account for even a larger portion of the $9.99 album price. Then you have the potential problem of unpopular tracks being priced below the statutory mechanical royalty rate.

Clearly, a straight-line popularity pricing strategy isn't the answer. You might instead start with a minimum track price and adjust upward based on track popularity, or perhaps set a maximum price for the most popular track, say $1.99, and work your way down to price the remaining tracks.

Yet even with such modifications, there's another issue, a band might release a song on several albums -- on the original album, as part of a greatest hits collection, etc. While "Every Breath You Take" accounts for around 32% of the tracks plays of the Synchronicity album, in the context of the Police's greatest hits CD, it accounts for fewer spins. Popularity would have to be considered in the context of a band's entire catalog. The problem is, overall song popularity changes over time and very suddenly whenever a band releases a new album.

Finally, how could this method work for new releases? A record label might choose the "singles" from a new album before its release date, but there's no way to accurately predict which songs fans will, on average, listen to the most.

So I'm nixing song popularity as the basis for individual track pricing. Stay tuned for Part III of this series and a proposed pricing plan that would maintain the $9.99 album price, give the labels more money for the most popular tracks, yet still keep music fans happy.