In other words: can blogs and social media help us figure out whether an album will sell better (or worse) than others? That’s the question Vasant Dhar and Eline Chang from NYU’s Stern Business School tried to answer.
Their research spanned eight weeks — four before the album drop, four after — and looked at 108 albums, from both indie and major labels. Since actual sales data (hello, Nielsen) is way too expensive, they used proxies like Amazon’s best-seller rankings, blog mentions, and the number of MySpace friends a band had (yep, this was a while ago).
Unsurprisingly, there was a clear correlation between album sales and things like blog buzz and MySpace popularity. But — and it’s a big but — traditional factors still mattered more. Albums released by major labels or with solid press coverage (like a good review in Rolling Stone) still had the edge.
The full study (about 30 pages) is available as a PDF on NYU’s site if you want to nerd out on the details.