Member Since: 1/1/2014
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Taylor & Meghan Have Biggest Selling Power in Current Market
Quote:
Results on the Billboard 200 were also quite palpable for Swift: “Bad Blood” is the fourth single from 1989, and with its sudden rise, the album itself leapt from ninth position to number two on the album charts, a veritable feat for any record in this single-serving music industry.
But Taylor Swift is not alone in making huge leaps on the Billboard 200 this week. Meghan Trainor’s debut, Title, also jumped seven places, from twelfth position to number five.
This in and of itself means nothing. But look back through the Billboard 200 over the last two months and you might notice a connection between these two albums. Indeed, throughout much of April and May, the chart positions of both LPs seemed intertwined:
On May 2nd, when 1989 dropped two positions, and so did Title. While other albums on the 200 moved up, down, or off the chart entirely, these two albums stayed in exactly the same place relative to each other. This occurred during the weeks of May 30th, April 11th and April 4th, to cite three examples of that trend.
To be clear, I’m not saying that their respective positions line up perfectly from week to week. There are obvious exceptions: On April 18th, 1989 held its own at number five, while Title dropped two places to number thirteen. A similar drop occurred the week of May 23rd, with 1989 staying in the same place as Title dropped from ten to twelve. A third inconsistency: on the week ending May 9th, Title gained two points, while 1989 only gained one.
However, within the window of acceptable, statistical variation, one can see something of a trend: with one exception in the last month, the movements of Title and 1989 have always been within two positions of each other: if one album stayed the same while the other moved, it was usually only within a margin of two positions (the sole exception occurred the week ending May 16th, when the variation between the two ticked slightly from two to three).
Perhaps more tellingly, at no moment in the last two months did one album rise while the other fell, leaving one to conclude that within the window of acceptable variation, there’s a link between sales of these two albums for the last two months—a relationship between their individual ebbs and flows, which is remarkable considering that no such relationship holds for their respective singles.
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If we examine other artists of similar ilk (similar to each other that is—not to Trainor or Swift) we can see no similar patterns or relationships on the Billboard 200. Take Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran, both young white solo acts in the singer/songwriter vein, both sporting similarly sultry and soulful vocals. For the past two months, their albums have risen and ducked independently, often oscillating in opposite directions.
If we’re going to group acts together by genre or micro-genre, there’s no pattern to discern between Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s latest offerings either—two albums which have been discussed together by various online outlets (not including separate Twitter debates). For instance, on April 18th, both records sallied downwards, but the week after that, Drake rose while Kendrick fell. By May 16th, Drake was occupying the number five position, while Kendrick dropped further to number nineteen.
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Can one hold this recent change accountable for the correlation between Trainor and Swift? It seems not: Billboard still releases a Top Album Sales chart which functions like the Billboard 200 of old. By this metric, Trainor and Swift are still linked in a similar manner as the way described above (moving in the same direction, usually within two points of each other, with minimal exceptions). The other examples listed do not follow any such pattern.
So here we’ve established two trends: that this environment is volatile, and that within this volatile environment, there seems to be a pattern between the album sales of Meghan Trainor and Taylor Swift.
Now as many are fond of saying, correlation does not equally causation. What this particular correlation does provide, however, is a snapshot into what kind of acts have the biggest selling power in this current market, one in which sales decrease while streaming becomes the new metric. This pattern seems to suggest which acts are still likely to sell album units holistically, and moreover, how these acts relate to one another.
For Meghan Trainor’s camp, this pattern also suggests something very useful in terms of projections: if her people want to see how well Title well sell next week, to some extent they only need to see how people are reacting to Taylor Swift this week. In other words, Trainor’s camp seem to have more than their own engines at their disposal—they also have Taylor Swift’s.
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Source - Forbes
Would Forbes lie?
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