Slacker Launches Digital Age Music Charts: Songs Fans Love + Songs That Suck
Music streamer Slacker today launched EQ Score, a new take on the music charts that measures not what tracks a fan likes, but also which ones they don't. Music charts were about sales and radio airplay, but the rise of streaming and social media alongside declines in sales and traditional media have led to an almost constant reconfiguring of what constitutes a hit.
Slacker's solution is to assign a number from 1 to 100, a Slacker EQ (Entertainment Quotient) score that measures hundreds of
millions of weekly data points that show how deeply users are engaging with a song on Slacker. Uniquely, the Slacker algorithm is based on both on positive and negative actions, including:
- Starts
– the number of times a song was started on the Slacker service - Completes
– the number of times a song was listened to in its entirety - Hearts
– the number of times a user “hearts” a track, requesting to hear it more
frequently - Shares –
the number of times a user shares a track via Facebook, Twitter, Google+,
Tumblr, Pinterest or email - Skips –
the number of times a song is skipped before reaching completion - Changes –
the number of times a user changes the station when a song plays - Bans –
the number of times a song or artist is banned from playing again
The company produced the infographic on how EQ works:
Slacker EQ scores will be released every Thursday, tracking 40 songs across multiple genres from the previous week. Slacker has also launched a station that counts down the 40.
this is a great idea, but it really doesn’t do the indie artist any good. when a chart like this only has 40 spots on it you’re only going to see established artists. in this digital age it’s hard to see the point in limiting a chart like this to 40 spots. plus, it’s the indie artists would care more about this and stand more to gain from it–i can’t imagine the major labels are going to give a rip if their artist appears here.
@Mason, agreed. It’ll be just another list of mainstream fodder. Great.
Perhaps a better business angle for Slacker would be to use their “ban” data to create a “bottom 40” chart and charge the labels for access (to help with their decision making on which acts to drop). Harsh, I know.