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Apple Podcasts update makes it easier to find content in your favorite genres
Apple has updated its Podcasts app on iOS, iPadOS and macOS with features that make it easier to find content in your favorite genres.
Spotify's new charts offer a more granular look at what's popular
A dedicated charts site shows the top artists, as well as what's popular in certain genres and cities.
Bad Bunny is Spotify's most-streamed artist of 2020
Spotify has released its year-end charts for 2020, offering further proof that Bad Bunny is very popular.
Spotify debuts podcast charts to let you know what's popular
Like the company does for music, Spotify will now offer charts that rank the most popular shows based on audience and the biggest trending selections. They’re called Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts, and they’ll be easy to find under Browse > Podcasts > Podcast Charts on both iOS and Android.
Billboard 200 charts will include online music videos
Billboard has included streaming music in its top 200 chart for years, but now it's ready to consider music videos as well. The industry publication has revealed that it will count official online music video plays from YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify and other services in the Billboard 200, starting with the charts for January 18th, 2020 (covering the first full week of January). The reasoning is quite straightforward -- this is meant to "accurately reflect the changing landscape" of music listening, Billboard's Deanna Brown said.
YouTube stops counting ad views in its top music charts
YouTube is boosting the integrity of its music charts. The video giant will no longer count ad views toward rankings on the YouTube Music Charts, instead relying solely on "organic" views like direct links, embeds, searches and the Trending section. This won't affect the achievements for previous videos, but any artist or label hoping to set a 24-hour record will have to do it by attracting viewers, not by spending a mountain of money on ads.
YouTube Music offers charts for the hottest songs and videos
If you thought YouTube's music video charts would be a logical fit for YouTube Music, you guessed correctly. The streaming media giant is rolling YouTube Charts into its Music service as playlists that you can find either on the app's home screen or through a search. If you want to listen to the most popular or trendiest songs, they should be a short hop away. All 29 YouTube countries will have both global and local versions of the top 100 songs and top 100 videos, and you'll also find a local-only top 20 trending list.
YouTube's revamped music charts focus on what's hot right now
YouTube hasn't been shy about wanting to be a cornerstone of the music industry, and that now includes one of the staples of the business: the charts. The video giant has launched revamped charts in 44 territories, headlined by a brand new "trending" section. The fresh area shows which music videos and songs are hot both worldwide and in given regions based on activity at multiple points in the day, with the option to play them all if you want a sense of the cultural zeitgeist.
The UK is getting a combined physical and digital games chart
A combined physical and digital games chart is finally coming to the UK. At the moment, the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) supplies GfK with exclusive data on boxed game sales. GfK's charts are considered the gold standard because of its relationship with the ERA, which counts GAME, Amazon and the nation's top supermarkets among its members. Now, the ERA has announced that its exclusivity deal with GfK will end in January 2019. Around the same time, it will start working with the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) and data services provider B2Boost on charts that include both physical and digital sales.
Billboard's music charts now feature Spotify song clips
Billboard has long been the authority on what's popular in music. The company tallies weekly rankings across charts like the Billboard 200 and Hot 100. With a hand from Spotify, you'll now have a way to listen to clips of songs on those charts without having to hunt for them elsewhere. Billboard announced the partnership today, and the snippets of tracks are already live on the weekly lists of what's popular in terms of audio entertainment.
Music releases move from Monday to Friday in the UK
The weekend is often the perfect time to listen to new music. Maybe you're getting ready for a night on the town, or sitting in the garden soaking up some rare summer sunshine. Whatever your plans, wouldn't it make the most sense if new music was released on Friday? Well, until today most albums and singles were released on Monday in the UK. Which was always a little confusing, given the date fluctuated depending on where you were in the world. Australia? Friday. The US? Tuesday. Thankfully, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has pulled the record labels, artists and retailers together to settle on a new, global release date: Friday. So now, when the next big album drops, there shouldn't be a scenario where it's available in the US version of iTunes and not the UK. To coincide with the shift, the UK is also moving its official charts (including the popular charts show on BBC Radio 1) to Friday, rather than Sunday. So say hello to "New Music Fridays" and wave goodbye to "Not Very Convenient Music Mondays."
Vinyl is back, and now it has its own UK top 40
Vinyl is making a comeback. Album sales in the UK climbed to 1.29 million last year -- the first time the 1 million mark has been surpassed since 1996. The format is still just a fraction of the total UK albums market (1.5 percent, to be precise) but now its success is being recognised in the charts. The UK's Official Charts Company is launching two vinyl-specific top 40s today -- one for albums and another for 7-inch and 12-inch singles -- for the first time in Britain. The renewed interest in vinyl doesn't appear to be slowing either, with album sales in the first quarter of 2015 up 69 percent from the same period last year. Is the growth from audiophiles, collectors, DJs, or a mixture of all three? It's not clear, but in the age of streaming, it's nice to see that analog still has a place with music lovers.
GTA5 tops PS4 digital sales charts for December
Gamers who found a PlayStation 4 under their Christmas trees last month very quickly turned their holiday cheer into murderous bloodshed, as Sony revealed that Rockstar's remastered port of Grand Theft Auto 5 ranked as the PlayStation 4's most popular digital purchase in the month of December. GTA 5 beat out Minecraft: PlayStation 4 Edition, Battlefield 4, and The Walking Dead: Season Two to claim the platform's top digital sales spot last month. Digital versions of Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare ranked as the PlayStation 3's best digital sellers in December, while Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition and Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment headed up the PS Vita charts. December was also a big month for classic RPGs. Konami's recently reissued Suikoden 2 took top honors in Sony's PS Classics sales chart last month, leading over the original Suikoden and Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7. [Image: Rockstar]
Billboard tweaks album sales chart to include streams, digital track sales
Until now, the Billboard 200 chart has been ranked based on albums sales, but that's about to change. On November 30th, that list will expand its criteria to include sales of a record's individual tracks and streaming plays for the chart that'll post on December 4th. Ten tracks sold will equal one album, while 1,500 spins via the likes of Spotify, Rdio or Beats Music from the same title will count as one sale, too. "Now we have the ability to look at that engagement and gauge the popularity of an album over time," Billboard's director of charts Silvio Pietroluongo told The New York Times. As you might expect, pop stars stand to benefit most.
Chartcube turns spreadsheets into stories and conversations
Spreadsheets are invaluable tools for sharing, explaining, and quantifying information, but they're a pain to present to other people. If you want to share data from an Excel document during a presentation, you usually have to cut and paste charts from Excel into Powerpoint, which limits exactly which data points you can show. Chartcube, a startup from former execs from Evernote and eBay, has a better way. Chartcube takes the data from your Excel worksheets, and creates an easily navigable "cube" on your iPad that shows different combinations of charts from the data with simple swipes of your finger. The end result is powerful and fun to use, making telling the story of your data a breeze. Swiping left or right allows you to flip through your various metrics. Swiping up or down flips through those metrics' grouping. The app also allows you to switch between how your data is summarized, including Sum, Count, and Average. Cubes can be shared with other users, who can add comments, questions, and notes. Information can be quickly imported via the Mail app or integration with Dropbox, and the app comes with AirPlay support for giving public presentations or simply viewing your data on a larger screen. Currently Chartcube is only available for iPad, but iPhone and Android versions are on their way within the next 12 months. Chartcube plans on using the same freemium model that has proven successful for businesses like Evernote, with enterprise options in the pipeline for the future. As for now, the company says they're simply focused on seeing how people respond to the app. Having used Chartcube for a few weeks now, the app's strengths are clear after a few minutes of use. Sorting data for presentations is easy, allowing you to answer any questions someone might have about your data with a clear visual representation without having to create a specific chart just for them. The cube already has that chart, you just have to learn how to find it. The learning curve isn't steep, but we recommend using the included Excel document as a tutorial a few times before you try Chartcube in a business meeting. If you regularly use spreadsheets during meetings, Chartcube may just become your next Evernote, an app you didn't know you needed until it was there. You can see a video of Chartcube in action below. It is currently available for free in the iTunes Store.
Eerie comparisons between MMOs and real life surface
We all joke about how unrealistic MMOs are to our mundane, tax-filled lives, but Redcentric did a little digging to compare how virtual worlds and the real one stack up in various ways. Some of the results proved astounding. With World of Warcraft, Redcentric noted that the population in both the game and the US military have about the same percentage of males (84% to 83%), while EVE Online's male population (96%) is more similar to that of the astronaut crowd (90%). The agency also noted how Second Life has 10 real-world embassies in it and that a previous ban of real-money trading in the game caused a very real financial crisis for a bank that wiped out $750,000. So how do these three titles compare to real-world cities in regards to population? World of Warcraft at its peak was close to Moscow's population (11.5 million), while Second Life almost hit the levels of San Fransisco (825K) and EVE Online barely surpassed Edinburgh's 495,000.
Minecraft, Battlefield 4, Terraria top December's PSN sales charts
Sony has listed the top-selling PlayStation Network games across all of its platforms in December, outlining the most popular digital releases in the month following the PlayStation 4's launch. EA DICE's Battlefield 4 ranks in as PSN's biggest-selling PlayStation 4 game in December, while Call of Duty: Ghosts emerged as the platform's most popular digital upgrade. Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition rose to the top of the PS3's charts in its debut month, meanwhile, beating out the first episode of The Walking Dead's second season and Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 5. 505 Games' Terraria led PS Vita software sales last month, as Media Molecule's Tearaway and Drinkbox Studios' Guacamelee! trailed close behind at second and third place. The full platform-specific sales charts are available at the PlayStation Blog.
Gran Turismo 6 tops weekly sales charts in Japan, moves 200,000 units
Polyphony Digital's PlayStation 3-exclusive racing sim Gran Turismo 6 ranks as Japan's biggest-selling software title in its debut week, selling over 200,000 copies since its launch on December 5, according to sales data analyst Media Create. Gran Turismo 6 takes the top chart spot in Japan with 204,784 total copies sold to date. A revised version of Square Enix's Wii MMORPG Dragon Quest X claims second place with 117,432 units sold in its first week of release. Nintendo's Pokemon X and Pokemon Y finish at third place with 111,790 copies sold this week, for a total of 3,200,919 units sold in total. Gran Turismo 6's first-place finish in Japan follows up on its sluggish start in the UK, where it sold five times fewer copies than its predecessor Gran Turismo 5 sold in its debut week in 2010. North American sales data for Gran Turismo 6 is not yet available.
Crowdfund Bookie: $23 million raised in six months
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the month and produces pretty charts for you to look at. The past six months have proven fruitful for crowdfunded games. In total, 186 different Indiegogo and Kickstarter video game projects earned $23,914,666 from the months of June through November. Those numbers are courtesy of 500,467 backers in the six-month period, who raised $13,173,182 beyond the combined goals of the projects to reach stretch goals that will bring games to additional platforms and grant players more content. On average, crowdfunding projects raised $128,573 in the last six months, but as we examined in our last quarterly report, these mean averages can be quite misleading. By comparison, the median, or middle number in the data set for the amount of money raised by each of the 186 projects, is $25,188. Given that only six of the projects raised at least one million dollars, and just seven more raised at least $500,000 during that time frame, we can conclude that the average amount of money raised by crowdfunding projects in the last six months is positively skewed. Similarly, the median number of backers per project was 542 (a sharp contrast to a mean average of 2,691). Future project creators should take note, then: Your average Kickstarter or Indiegogo gaming project earns closer to $25,188, not $128,573. Additionally, the data shows that strategy games like Hex and Warmachine: Tactics led the genre to the top of the list, as they earned the most money of the group ($6,901,527). Conversely, the adventure genre had the most successful projects, as 46 adventurous or narrative-driven games were funded in the last six months, such as Obduction and Armikrog. Action games had the highest number of backers (145,316), thanks especially to the highest-earning game of the group, Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9, which hauled in $3,845,170 thanks to 67,226 people. Head past the break to see the top-earning games and breakdown by genre for the six-month period.
Crowdfund Bookie, October 2013: Two is greater than 58
The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the week and produces pretty charts for you to look at. The month of October saw 172,360 people pledge $7,361,713 towards 42 successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo video game projects. To put that in perspective, that's 4,833 more project backers than the past three months combined. As discussed in our September quarterly report, some high-earning games serve as extreme samples in a month's data set. October was no different, as Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9 lured in $3,845,170 thanks to 67,226 backers. What's more, both Shantae: Half-Genie Hero and Hyper Light Drifter combined to account for 42,708 backers, which means these three projects had enough backers to match the number of funders in August and September combined, a two-month period that saw 58 successful projects. All three games fit into the action genre this month as well, which accounts for that category's high numbers. Without those three projects, the other four action games would have combined for only $113,876. October also saw some of the first Canada-based developers take advantage of Kickstarter's expansion to the country, which began in September. Eight projects came from Canadian developers, three of which were among the top six earning games for the month: RimWorld, The Long Dark and River City Ransom: Underground. The eight games accounted for 11.16 percent of the overall picture for the month ($821,411), so it'll be interesting to watch for the impact Kickstarter's expansion has on our crowdfunding trends. The funding platform will open up to Australia and New Zealand-based creators on November 13, as well. Head past the break for the month's breakdown by genre as well as the list of October's top five earners.
