STUDY SHOWS BLOGGING BOOSTS ALBUM SALES (BUT DON’T TELL FRED DURST OR COURTNEY LOVE)
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 12:36pm by Vince Neilstein
Does blogging boost album sales? According to researchers at New York University, the answer is yes [Digital Music News]. The group found that the volume of blogging surrounding a release “significantly affects future album sales,” though the number of MySpace friends carried a looser correlation with success. The group tracked physical album sales on 108 titles, four weeks before and after the release date. Digital sales were not tracked in the study. The research team found that releases with more than 40 blog posts felt a sales boost, and major labels multiplied the effect by a factor of twelve.
The correlation question is a critical one; does blogging cause increased album sales or do high-profile releases generated more blog buzz anyway? In other words it’s a chicken vs. the egg question.
We sure hope we helped the cause for bands like Sikth, At All Cost and Protest the Hero; but hopefully our inordinate amount of rants about Limp Bizkit and Korn didn’t contribute to Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis’ retirement accounts. Surely the researchers weren’t taking into account MetalSucks-style bashing when they released their results…
-VN
It seems like common sense to me that blogging would increase album sales. Myspace is very informal, and you can have 2000000000000 friends, and have 1,99999999999999 of them never even listen to your band. If someone is reading a blog, they are engaged, thus have to take in the message, whether they choose to act on it or not. Also people tend to have a motivation to check out bands being blogged about, either to talk about why they like it, or more commonly, give them some fuel for bashing!!!
Well, it’s also common sense that albums that are bound to be popular would show more web activity in general pre-release…including blogging….which in turn increases web-presence..generating more hits…
Chickens and eggs, like the man said.
So, NYU ‘research’ really got to the bottom of an important, unsolvable issue with the conclusion:
“It’s hard to say.”
Reminds me of the old quote, “No such thing as bad publicity”. Just as long as there is some buzz going on, it’s going to keep you in the spotlight. Trent Reznor is getting pretty good at this, and I mean that as a compliment to him. He says he’s got some secret things going on and we’re all up in it without a single clue as to what it is.