Monday, August 5, 2013

HOW DO A SONG MAKE IT ON OUR TOP 10?

by Dwight L. Quinn


Each week (Monday and Friday), Quinn Records TM puts together a chart of it's top 10 most popular songs based on a national sample of top 10 radio airplay, top 10 radio playlists, and music sales. Since our Top 10 comes from the 220 radio stations, APD,89 Digital Companies,YouTube Reporting, 40 Cable TV Channels tracked each week, let's look at how our tracking is compiled. 
First, there is airplay. What songs of ours that is actually being played on the radio and on music video channels on TV and screaming? Frequent calls to program directors and disc jockeys that reports and have their finger on the music, this is our good measure of what their listeners like. Airplay is tracked through our in-house Radio trackers, Air Play Direct (APD), YouTube and Broadcast Data Systems (BDS), run by Nielsen. BDS uses digital pattern-recognition technology to identify songs that are played on radio stations and music video TV channels across the United States and Canada. With the combination of Physical tracking a.k.a Manual tracking and the incorporation of tracking Technology, we've been able to track 24 hours a day, seven days a week, following over 220 targeted Radio Stations,APD,Digital Distributor,Cable TV YouTube and Spotify weekly. 

 Our Radio Promotions Department manual tracking consist of Playlists and verbal reporting from Radio with emphasis placed on obtaining as close as possible the number of people listening to a the station and we would multiply that number by the number of times one of our songs are played.

 When the company record a new song, a copy of the recording is sent to BDS so it can be encoded and tracked by its system on the stations it monitors. This data is used not only by Quinn in compiling our weekly Top 10 chart, but also by record company executives, radio stations, publishing firms, performance rights organizations (to calculate performance royalties), music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV producers, and artist managers.  

Another measure of what song of ours that is hot and what people are buying. To find out what music is selling in record stores, Quinn goes to Sound Scan  Nielsen Sound Scan is an information system that tracks the sales of music and music videos throughout the United States and Canada. By scanning the bar codes, they can collect sales information from cash registers each week from over 14,000 retail, mass merchant, and non-traditional sources such as online stores, concert sales, etc. The data is compiled and used in positioning the song on our Top 10 each Monday and Friday. Like BDS data, the data from Sound Scan is also very valuable for us in compiling a clear Top 10 Song Chart. 

 Our method for compiling our Top 10 Song chart have gone through a change or two over the past five years. Since publicizing our Radio Promotions Reports and Activities as a Promotional tool, we followed the foot prints of the icon of Charts, Billboard  we to changed the weighting of airplay versus sales in the compiling our Top 10 Song Chart. We found through researching and practical experiences that tracking a single song through album sales isn't exactly accurate, singles sales have always been used to track the sales side of song popularity. But, since only about 20% of people actually buy singles and over 90% listen to the radio, it made sense for us too, to alter the ratio of points. Now, the overall points are weighted to 20% sales and 80% airplay. 

 Quinn's Top 10 Song Chart is an important and valuable tool that let our fans,user of our music, music retailers,radio stations, promoters, film and TV producers, artist managers know what kind of music that we offer and how the music that we offer is performing in the very highly competitive music marketplace. The information that our Top 10 Song Chart gives to the Buyer is precious, it gives the Buyer the kind of Education that he or she needs to make the right Buying decision. 

 Quinn bases its Top 10 Song charts on its own prerecorded music and what is already being played on the radio and purchased in music stores, this is also the avenue to how radio stations find out about our new music. 

 Visit Us: www.quinnrecords.net

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