Billboard Charts over the years.

 If you are a fan of music you know about the Billboard Music Charts. The Billboard company was founded in 1894 and is known for publishing pieces involving news, video, opinion, reviews, events, style and of course, it’s music charts. It was on January 4^th of 1936 that Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade (chart). The first Music Popularity Chart was calculated in July 1940 and the company has been reporting and expanding its charts ever since.

Currently, The Hot 100 combines data from single sales, radio airplay, digital downloads, and streaming activity. This includes data from YouTube and other video sites. Prior to 1991 Billboard obtain its data from manual reports filled out by radio stations and stores. That November Billboard used Nielsen SoundScan and Nielson Broadcast Data Systems (BDS) to chart the Hot 100 and R&B chart for that year.

In 1983, Michael Jackson dominated March to April with ‘Billie Jean’ and April to May with ‘Beat It’. He had the most Hot 100’s that year. Other artists like The Police and Irene Cara dominated the summer. Ten years later in 1993, Whitney Houston topped the chart with what was arguably the song of the year ‘I will Always Love You (From “The Bodyguard”)’. Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were on fire with hits like ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ and ‘Hero’. The twist is that in the 50^th anniversary issue of Billboard, prior to the official implementation of SoundScan tracking in November 1991, many radio stations and retail stores removed songs from their manual reports after the associated record labels stopped promoting a particular single. So can we even trust the charts for the years prior to 1991?

Kobalt Goes Big

On Monday, Kobalt, a music services and technology company, received $75 million dollars in funding. Hearts Entertainment and existing investors Balderton Capital and MSD Capital have invested $75 million in Kobalt after it achieved a $700 million valuation.

Kobalt intends to be a company that stands out from the traditional record label models while still fulfilling artists needs and putting the artists first. The mission as displayed on its site reads "Making the music industry more fair and rewarding for creators. [He] wanted to give artists, songwriters, musicians, labels and publishers the freedom and transparency they needed to build their careers. 

CEO Williard Ahdritz said in a statement to Billboard, "With the high growth of streaming and the billions of micro transactions that take place per song, the music industry is more complex than ever. Guided by core principles of transparency, technology and putting creators first, I have never been more sure that our platform, combined with our global creative team, is the right one to serve creators and rights owners in the rapidly evolving digital music environment." 

Kobalt data shows that a typical hit song currently has 4 billion micro-transactions and typically hit songs are expected to grow to 10 billion micro transactions within 18 months. With that said the company wants to insure its systems can handle the exponential growth in volume and that is where the $75 million in new funding comes into play. 

Streaming data is changing the game. 

Billboard & Pandora Streaming Data

Billboard announced earlier this year that it now has an exclusive agreement with Pandora to include the service’s streaming data to the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart. When initially implemented the data positively impacted several songs. Among them were Rihanna’s ‘Sex With Me’, Bebe Rexha’s ‘I Got You’, and Rob $tone’s ‘Chill Bill’ that featured J.Davi$ and Spooks.

Pandora currently is the number 1 radio station in 87 of the U.S. markets. It represents about 10 percent of all radio listening. Because of this, the data gives an even greater insight into what listeners love and don’t love in respective genres. As Pandora has grown they realized the data collected would be extremely beneficial for the industry. They have shared data with music industry professionals and artists, direct-deal label partners and of course now Billboard. “With the inclusion of Pandora data, the Billboard charts that have guided listeners and been so central to the music industry for decades now reflect a truer measure of a song's popularity today. I'm thrilled that the 'Pandora effect' will now be formally recognized in the industry's gold standard for measurement,” says Pandora founder and CEO Tim Westergren.

Billboard also has been utilizing data from Next Big Sound since 2010 which we know was acquired by Pandora. It almost sounds like these 3 are trying to corner the market.