Is The Chart Playing You?

I received this email last week from one of my reliable old pals at Mercury Nashville:   

"Thank you all for the great support of Scotty McCreery’s current single See You Tonight. 48 weeks old!  We will ship Scotty’s Feelin it on 3/31 and go for adds on 4/14 a month from now.  Great tune for the upcoming summer!! Those who took so long to add See You Tonight PLEASE don’t wait so long this time!  Scotty’s the real deal and has a ton of fans listening to your radio station. He’s on his way!"

Of course, we all wish the very talented Scotty well, but the fact that it took 48 weeks to find out that a tune isn't going to be a hit simply has to contribute to repetition complaints from listeners.  

Pity the poor station which added it early, convinced that it was a hit and now their listeners are left wondering why it's not being played anymore.

Yet, I appreciate a savvy promotion exec who can be honest like that.  

Few are, and it builds a lot of trust, which of course they will need now as they turn toward a project which they have to hope will have more success:

Currington finally made it to the top 30 last week, which means it now stands to gain from weekend countdown spins as it now enters an increasingly competitive part of the charts as Stone Door Media Lab's Jeff Green explained in his CRS 2014 session along with Musicmetric's Mark Tindle (click to read a recap of it in last week's Country Aircheck - pdf)

To give you an idea of what the promotion team behind "We Are Tonight" faces in the coming weeks and provide some stats to see how well they do, I dug into some of the metrics Green explained at CRS (note the interpretations of the benchmarks are mine only based on the statistical norms used at the CRS panel):
  

1.  MOST ADDED TREND
The song has been among the top 3 most added once (Nov. 18), but no better than that. Statistically, that indicates no better than a 31% chance of going No. 1.

2.  CHART TEMPO TRENDS
A. The single did not have any "backmoves" before breaking Top 40, which is good, and only one backmove on its road to Top 30, which is also good. So there's nothing in terms of "wobbles" to cause alarm on its current week-to-week pacing.

B. However, it's taken Billy 12 weeks from chart debut to No. 30. While there have been a few No. 1 singles in recent history that took longer, they were mostly protracted battles: L&T's "Angel Eyes," "Randy Houser's "How Country Feels," Brett Eldredge's "Don't Ya," Parmalee's "Carolina" and Eric Paslay's "Friday Night." Note that these were mostly newer artists, as well, so for an established act like Billy to take this long suggests a struggle, especially since "Hey Girl" (also a No. 1) broke the top 30 in just seven weeks.  Stone Door Media Lab data indicates the average No. 1 is already between chart positions 9-10 by chart week 12. Since the average Country single only has a chart life of 16 weeks, this one needs to catch fire soon.

C. Historical data indicates that a single typically ranking Top 30 should be averaging between 14-15 spins per week. Billy's averaging around 11, which indicates PD confidence in this single is below average.

3.  SALES TREND
Established artists such as Billy recently have been averaging 2.3 weeks on the chart before top 100 sales materialize. Specifically, 86% of established artists break into the top 100 sales within three weeks of reaching the CA/Mediabase top 50. It took "We Are Tonight" more than twice as long -- five weeks -- to reach Top 100 sales. Another lagging indicator, sadly.

4.  SALES PER SPIN TREND
Sales-per-spin (click the link to see Nielsen's SXSW presentation on deemphasizing sales with streaming growing so quickly now) on "We Are Tonight" are modest. "Hey Girl" averaged 10+ per spin its first 10 weeks.

OVERALL
The average chart peak of an established act (looking at charting singles for the first half of 2013) is 8, and the average chart peak of all songs that chart is 20. There are always exceptions, of course, and we've seen many singles eventually peak well above what the data would project. It appears that Billy would do very well to crack the top 10-15 with this single, but, frankly, the data benchmarks at this point are not supporting it going further than that.  That may be why Universal is clearing the decks now to focus on it rather than dividing their efforts between it and Scotty.
 
As financial advisers say, "Past performance is not an indicator of future results," and I hope that digging into this kind of historical research would never hurt any record's chances of success.

Apart from some hits that are so obvious that they require no special insight, there are "taste-changing" artists such as Eric Church, who took a good while to break through. And there are songs that take many months to reach No. 1 and defy all statistical odds along the way, but prove to be critical career-launchers and pay tribute to the promotional perseverance of the labels, managers, publishers and early believers at radio.

What does it do for the format if we lose all songs that don't have momentum in the first eight weeks or so?

I asked Jeff Green this question, and we agree (as would many others): It would be a bad thing. 

Needless to say, breakthrough singles by Brett Eldredge, Parmalee, Lee Brice, David Nail, Eric Paslay, Craig Campbell, Charlie Worsham, etc., would not have become hits and would have adversely affected their futures. Everyone realizes that a new single has many "parents" with a lot of time, patience, commitment and money invested. No one wants to give up on a single (or artist) without a fight, nor should they. And to kill off a single simply because some statistics suggest a headwind could mean missing a big opportunity.

Green acknowledges that both Stone Door and Musicmetric are only beginning to identify correlations with newer and potentially powerful exposure forces such as Shazam tags, VEVO spins, BitTorrent activity, iTunes, Beats and Amazon, which furnish a broader range of information as part of the overall "hit evaluation" process.

However, the costs to develop an artist are astronomical, and, in general, there's no good reason why it should so frequently take eight or nine months to find out if a single has hit potential. Film studios, television executives and book publishers are usually able to get a reasonably accurate grip on the commercial value of their artistic releases very early on, typically within a matter of weeks. I also agree with Green that for smaller, independent labels in particular, the cost savings in being able to assess a single's potential early on could be enormous.

And, of course, that would mean less "needless" repetition (songs that don't go all the way) for radio as well.  Online music testing and MScore tracking are radio's additional very fast leading indicators, which I think we all need to follow more than just getting in line in response to music promotion that standardizes playlists around a national chart.

As we test new ways to do that, we'll reduce complaints of "too much needless repetition" as well which may start to rebuild our slipping time spent listening among "dissatisfied core listeners."