Many tech startups have been praised (over hyped) and then fallen. It appears the Ultimate Chart could be another one. Any so-called chart is pointless without the numbers. One week a song could be Number 1 with 1 million sales, the next week a song could be Number 1 with 500K sales
While cmparisons between Billboard's Hot 100 and the Ultimate Chart should be completely different, they are remarkably close to the same! This should be nonsense for just a few reasons:
- Billboard is American sales and radio play only
- Ultimate is supposedly worldwide and includuing YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, MySpace, MTV
- Billboard is physical and digital sales plus authenticated radio share
- Ultimate supposedly includes sales alongside popularity on worldwide social media
Therefore Ultimate Chart is lying OR its weightings on importance of the sources it supposedly follows is wrong. What they say is clearly untrue if the Ultimate chart and the Billboard chart are almost the same. Direct quotes from the Ultimate site:
- We collect billions of points of data, online and off
- We collect more relevant information from more sources than anyone ever has, by our count
One simple example will prove this is rubbish. The Above & Beyond podcast on iTunes for Trance Around The World has 25 million subscribers. So EACH WEEK the TATW podcast is received by 25 million people. This is far more than any one of the so-called Top 40 sell each week.
It is time the so-called charts caught up with reality - streaming and freemium are where the listener numbers count. And, long term, that is where the money is!
Two-thirds of the way through the year and some albums are starting to look like they could be in our Top 10 of 2010 lists which, mainly, cover metal, rock, progressive, techno and dance/trance. We keep a keen eye on what the charts call 'pop' but which we might call rock or r'n'b or whatever. Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Allison Iraheta and Leona Lewis could all be in one of our Top 10 lists and that shows why genres are so hard to define today.
Multimedia snippets that can be viewed on computers and portable devices such as iPods and web enabled phones are called podcasts. The key to their popularity may be the fact that they can be received and displayed on a plethora of devices, which makes them as pervasive as radio and as engaging as TV. Think of it as your own homemade commercial for your business. Podcasts can be syndicated using RSS (really simple syndication). This is the same process that people use to keep up with blogs and websites. The RSS feed allows them to receive updates when changes are made on the site so they don't have to visit every day.
We now know that Girls - not Guys - were the dominant force in music in the past 10 years, despite the never-ending cover stories about weak metrosexual rappers or pretty boy 'singers'.
Ellen DeGeneres struggled to find the right words at times but the overall impression was that Ellen had a good ear for excellent music-making. A promising start by the new judge, and she supplied the "hottest" quote of the show. 
Simon Cowell continued to give some of the contestants a harsh reality check, able to summarise both the musical and business issues in a few sentences. He is often not popular but is usually right. And, at last, seems to have lost his anti-girl bias of the past two years.
