I was looking at the sales figures for the last three xmas charts and I can't help thinking that something is a bit strange.

In 2008 the Jeff Buckley Hallelujah campaign sold abt 80k of 'eligible' sales but also sold, I believe, several hundred thousand 'ineligible' ones.

In 2009 Rage sold 502k, seemingly all sales were 'eligible'.

This year the Bird campaign only sold 68k of 'eligible' sales but I'm willing to bet that there were many ineligible ones, maybe on the same scale as Hallelujah in 2008.

 

So were there some sort of rule changes that made what was considered ineligble in 2008 become eligible in 2009 for Rage but again become ruled ineligible for Bird in 2010. My feeling is that it is something to do with iTunes rules or data as this year Bird was number one on all the other online reatilers, at some point at least if not all week, and yet stuck on three all week behind Rihanna on iTunes. There was, in my mind at least, no way that the Bird campaign was so unpopular compared to Rage last year for it to have had such a low figure in comparison. Is it to do with the maximum number of purchases on iTunes? We were told repeatedly during the Bird campaign that we were allowed a max of three copies from any retailer before all your purchases from that retailer were declared 'ineligble' due to being a 'bulk buy', with the notable exception of iTunes where only one copy was allowed before all copies would be 'ineligible'. Was iTunes allowing three purchase like all other retailers during the Rage campaign and changed sometime this year? And what was the reason behind the 'ineligble' Jeff Buckley sales in 2008?

The only other thing I can think may have happened is that the OCC may have forgotten to remove the ineligible sales from the data last year, announced the incorrect chart/result, and then not wanted to admit to their error and let it stand. That may be unlikely but vaguely possible and in that case the campaigns would then have been more in line with each other and with what I'd've expected.

 

Sorry if this is all a bit waffly and the questions are a bit vague but to me the numbers really don't add up, though I may be personally biased as I was heavily involved in the Bird campaign and was only very vaguely aware of the Rage one last year which became my first ever download (the muppets bo rhap was my second the same week :P ) and ended my physical singles collecting which in turn ended my weekly trips to town, as with Woolies gone and then not buying singles I didn't really need to go into town anymore.

 

 

I'm not an expert on this, but firstly, it is said that iTunes currently accounts for about 80% of overall sales. Therefore, being #1 on another download site, which might account for 2% of the overall sales might not mean a whole lot in comparison.

 

Secondly, as far as I am aware, multi-buying the same track on iTunes does not contribute to the iTunes chart, and the additional purchases are not chart eligible. At least, I think, that has been the case for the past few years at least. You can multi-buy tracks on iTunes, if you buy different versions of a single, so the sales get combined by the OCC.

 

I'm not an expert on this though, so I could be wrong.

 

However, I do think the campaign last year was simply bigger. It was all over the news much more, in the papers, etc, and a lot of people I know who are into rock music got very enthusiastic about the campaign.

 

Unfortunately, thanks to that campaign, the top 2 on Christmas week, and the week after was the worst of the entire year, by far. :(

 

Btw, sorry if my input is kind of useless here. :lol:

I may seem from the media coverage (or lack of) this year that Rage was much much bigger but Bird had 634,000 members on the main page and many spin-off/copy cat pages so that should've been enough to get much higher sales. Once people already knew about the campaign they didn't need TV to tell them about it, enough people were already there if you see what I mean.

 

BTW the result of last years campaign was to convert many people over to downloads who weren't already downloading, so that is partly why 2010 sales have been higher I think, at least for singles/tracks.

 

While we're talking about fb xmas #1 campaigns I want to mention an idea I've seen on fb called 'Let The People Decide Xmas No1 2011' which is doing what it says on the tin by taking on board any nominations for possible campaigns (including all the various campaigns already on fb) and then next year holding voting to decide which track is the most popular choice and therefore the one to promote as the main campaign.

I'm not an expert on this, but firstly, it is said that iTunes currently accounts for about 80% of overall sales. Therefore, being #1 on another download site, which might account for 2% of the overall sales might not mean a whole lot in comparison.

 

That 80% figure is *far* too high - AIUI it was only 70% even *before* Amazon downloads came on line. I would guess the iTunes market share is now more like 60-65%.

I may seem from the media coverage (or lack of) this year that Rage was much much bigger but Bird had 634,000 members on the main page and many spin-off/copy cat pages so that should've been enough to get much higher sales. Once people already knew about the campaign they didn't need TV to tell them about it, enough people were already there if you see what I mean.

 

More like most people couldn't be bothered, or indeed most people believed that you could multi-download the same version of the same track from iTunes and have all sales count towards the chart, despite being told frequently that this was not possible.

 

And, as has been said, iTunes accounts for 60-65% of the overall share of the chart, whereas Amazon, HMV etc account for about 5% each so being #1 on them is in effect meaningless.

 

BTW the result of last years campaign was to convert many people over to downloads who weren't already downloading, so that is partly why 2010 sales have been higher I think, at least for singles/tracks.

 

Partly, maybe accounts for about 0.001% of the increase in 2010 sales compared with 2009. This is typical of that Bird group - misinformed conjecture which becomes fact solely due to it being repeated ad nauseum.

 

FYI, sales have been increasing at higher rates from 2006->2007, 2007->2008, 2008->2009 than they have between 2009 and 2010, and the increases in those earlier years had nothing to do with Facebook campaigns. So for you to come on here and spout your non

 

While we're talking about fb xmas #1 campaigns I want to mention an idea I've seen on fb called 'Let The People Decide Xmas No1 2011' which is doing what it says on the tin by taking on board any nominations for possible campaigns (including all the various campaigns already on fb) and then next year holding voting to decide which track is the most popular choice and therefore the one to promote as the main campaign.

These Facebook campaigns need to seriously just disappear. Why should people on Facebook spam accounts and tell people what they should be buying? We've got Simon Cowell to do that for us already ;)

These Facebook campaigns need to seriously just disappear. Why should people on Facebook spam accounts and tell people what they should be buying? We've got Simon Cowell to do that for us already ;)

 

That's kind of the point of them, they're trying to get something fun/quirky/actually good to the top of the charts ahead of whatever Cowell releases.