David Emery Online

Sex, data and rock and roll

14 September 2014

It’s not all sex, drugs and rock and roll this music lark, you know. I’m not sure exactly which of those it replaces - pessimistically probably both the first two - but if you’re talking music in 2014 there’s also data to think about as well.

I’m typically not fond of all the floods of data and analytics that some sections of the industry seem utterly obsessed by, as they can take over your life such is the depth that most tools offer. What I do like however are simple tools that tell you useful things.

A couple of years ago I hacked together something along those lines (simple more due to my limitations more so than anything else…) that checked the iTunes UK chart and pinged me an email anytime one of the releases I was working on moved up or down the charts. It made a brief appearance in this post about the Mercury Prize as well, and has altogether been quite handy over the years.

Now, when you make something that checks the iTunes albums chart every 30 minutes and leave it running for two years you end up with a lot of data. Like, 700mb of data. I thought it might be interesting to pull some tidbits out of it. All the numbers below are taken from mid August 2012 to mid September 2014.

So first off, how many albums are we talking about?:

Ok then, how about seeing which releases have spent the longest amount of time in the top 200?:

Longest Time In The Top 200

Interesting to see the Arctic Monkey's debut album up there rather then one of their newer ones. Also worth nothing that there's only a tiny difference between Bruno Mars and Alt-J at the very top of this list, and considering that record is still in the top 200 and Bruno isn't I imagine in a few days or so they'll swap around.

But who cares about just being in the top 200 for ages? What we really want to know is who's spent longest at number 1:

Longest Time At Number 1

In summary: you all bloody well love "Now". Also, Christmas doesn't seem to warrent the customary exclamation mark, even though we all know that it is, indeed, exciting.

If we stick focusing on Various Artist releases, how about we look at the top 10 artists with the most releases that have featured in the charts:

And in table form, so you can see actually who those thin slivers at the top are:

Most releases appearing in the top 200

With them being the equal 2nd artist that has had the most releases in the iTunes charts in the last two years, I suppose U2 aren't the worst choice for Apple to give away a free new record of (although I bet it would have gone down a bit better if it was Bowie...).

And finally, let's look at who's stuck it out in the Top 10 for the longest:

Longest Time In The Top 10

So there we go then, Alt-J win the award for sticking it out in the top 10 for longest.

Drop me a line if you have any ideas for anything else interesting I might be able to dig out of this data.