DOES blog, social network buzz correlate to better album sales?

A week or so ago Ars technica published a story about some research looking into how chatter on blogs, number of myspace friends or mainstream reviews correlated with sales.

The story was then picked up by other reporting services/aggregators, like Musically, who reported the story as Blog buzz could drive album sales, research suggests. The Musically take on the story suggests causality between blog posts and album sales and goes on to say that the number of MySpace friends a band has also correlates to sales (which the original research does not say).

In the research paper itself the key phrase buried deep is: “…it is natural to ask whether it is reasonable to conclude that increased blog chatter really causes an increase in sales since it does, after all, precede sales. It is not possible to make such a conclusion based on this study.” In fact later on they explicitly caution against assumptions of causality. They go on to talk about various correlated variables. This study only looks at physical sales anyway, and then only Amazon, and then not actual sales but a guess based on Amazon.com sales ranks. Start to see the holes?Among their ideas for future studies includes taking into account the sentiment of blog posts which I think is when it gets interesting.

Sadly, what I think this story really illustrates is how the pressure to find news makes some editors post half baked stories and before you know it everyone in the industry has only read a wrong, short edit concluding things that are half true at best.

The evolution of the format of choice

…from This is London music blog whilst mulling over the Klaxons’ Mercury Prize win:

“the remix, appended to some fashionable blog, is probably the form of our times, in much the way that the 7-inch single was in the 60s and the 12-inch LP was in the 70s.”

Interesting? why?

Well the difference with teh arrival of the remix on a blog is that the remix is usually distributed throughout the public i) outside of the record company’s control, ii) in a non-royalty paying form (i.e. copyright infringing post).

Perez Hilton blog mired in legal complaints

Here’s a bit of an aside from what we normally cover, but still raises interesting issues. The gossip blog PerezHilton.com is finding it hard to stay fully functioning under the weight of complaints from photo agencies and the consequent lack of support from ISPs. The article at Plagiarism Today notes that Perez’s high volume of complaints, coupled with high volume of visitors mean he is probably an unattractive proposition for many ISPs. Unless an ISP can streamline it’s take down program, the costs are unlikely to be met by the hosting fees being paid byt the site incurring the takedown requests.

it’s all going on…

Universal Music and Sony BMG both do deals with YouTube, probably eliminating at a stroke (well, almost) the worst single video copyright infringement problem on the internet. Google buys YouTube so now owns all the YouTube infringement in addition to those it hosts links to on Blogspot blogs. And then … on Paid Content, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney is reported at Mipcom as saying “We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood’s most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. “It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates competes the same way we do – through quality, price and availability. We we don’t like the model but we realise it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.” I got a few days out of the office then will get things back up to date…