On Second Thought, SoundScan Claims Mos Def T-Shirt Doesn't Count As An Album Sale

from the that's-pretty-silly dept

On Friday, we thought that Mos Def's experiment with selling an album via a t-shirt (whereby if you bought the t-shirt, you got to download the album) was a pretty cool idea. What seemed even cooler was the claim that Nielsen Soundscan would count each t-shirt sale as an album sale. However, Soundscan has come out claiming this simply is not true:

"Nielsen Soundscan knows nothing about this and without knowing more, we have no intention of counting units triggered by the sale of a t-shirt."

The company offering up the t-shirts tried to explain, saying:

Instead of directly reporting retail sales through his company, Invisible DJ, Wineberg plans to relay the information back to the label. The label, in turn, can then submit the sale to Soundscan.

Hmm. That's not quite the same thing as saying Soundscan will count the t-shirt sales? And, it may be even worse, as Soundscan said it may count those sales submitted by the label, but only after "a discussion and negotiation." In other words, there's no real deal here at all, and nothing to suggest that the t-shirts will be counted as album sales.

Of course, that's ridiculous. In this era when the "music" is getting people to buy other stuff, the specific number of "album" sales is meaningless. We've seen artists who embrace these unique models making a lot more money from them, but they don't appear as top sellers because Soundscan only wants to count one (increasingly smaller) part of the ecosystem? That sort of thinking reinforces the misguided focus on the "album."

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Companies Disabling 'Reply-All' Button, Rather Than Dealing With Inane Email Threads

from the one-way-to-deal-with-the-problem dept

Last month, the US State Department made plenty of news for threatening to punish employees who misused the "reply-all" button on their email clients. That, by itself, seemed a bit extreme, but Jeremy Wagstaff alerts us to the fact that some organizations are going a step further and figuring out ways to disable the reply-all button entirely. The latest to do so is Nielsen, which did so with a cheery memo to staff explaining why this would "reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space." That's one way to think about it.

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Nielsen Decides It Can Become A Copyright Cop Too

from the media-monitoring-or-media-blocking? dept

As media companies continue their quixotic quest to some "stop" unauthorized use of content, tools providers are all too eager to rush in with promises of being able to help -- even if the tools don't actually help much. However, that's why there are a ton of "DRM" companies out there, all trying to provide the latest useless DRM tech to media companies too clueless to understand why DRM will never work. The latest is that companies are rushing to be the latest vendors to supply the entertainment industry with watermarking or filtering software to try to "stop" piracy. First there was the company Audible Magic, who the entertainment industry described as its magic bullet in stopping piracy. While some have pointed out that Audible Magic doesn't work particularly well, it has become something of the standard for companies to implement. In fact, it was something of a surprise earlier this year when Google decided to build its own filtering solution, rather than just use Audible Magic.

However, with so much demand for Audible Magic's non-working solution, you knew others had to jump in -- and some of them would be big players. The big media monitoring firm Nielsen is now entering the space with a big announcement, suggesting that its knowledge and connections within the television world will help it dominate the market. Of course, there doesn't seem to be much discussion on how Nielsen's solution is likely to be just as useless as Audible Magic's or anyone else's in trying to "stop" unauthorized copies from getting online. Of course, the entertainment companies remain too clueless to realize that all of these vendors are simply robbing them blind, promising them a magic elixir that can never work and only distracts the companies from what they should be doing: adapting to the changing market with new business models. In the article about Nielsen's announcement, NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, declares that Nielsen's entrance is a game changer: "The point is the big boys are coming, and that signals that this is a field that has reached technological maturity. It will achieve widespread commercial adoption, and from a content point of view, it will contribute dramatically to reducing the easy theft of copyrighted material online."

We'll record that here and check back in the future to see how accurate he is. I have no doubt that these technologies will achieve widespread commercial adoption -- but only because folks like Cotton actually believe that it will "dramatically" reduce infringement (which he incorrectly calls "theft"). Of course, Cotton is no stranger to outlandish and dramatic statements. He's the same guy who claimed that the cops were spending too much money on things like burglary and bank-robbing when they should be focused on important things like copyright infringement. He's also responsible for the totally ridiculous claim that movie piracy was hurting corn farmers. So, I'd take anything he says with a rather large grain of salt.

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New Website Measurement System Just A Little Less Useless Than Previous One

from the keeping-score dept

In a bid to improve the relevance of its ratings, Nielsen/NetRatings has announced that it will no longer use page views as its primary metric for measuring the popularity of websites. Instead, it will focus on the amount of time that users spend on the site. Obviously, there have been a lot of problems with the current system, as the use of page views grossly inflates the popularity of some sites, like MySpace, while penalizing sites that aren't refreshed or reloaded as often. As the above article notes, the new system will give YouTube a boost, but will ding Google's main site, which isn't designed to keep users around. Of course, therein lies the flaw with this new measurement system. Google is incredibly profitable and successful, precisely because it does a good job of whisking users away to other sites, either through ads or its search results. The idea of penalizing it because users don't spend a lot of time on the site is absurd. When it comes to TV shows, it may make sense to adopt a uniform measurement system, because all TV shows have the same purpose: to sell ads. Websites, however, have a variety of different business models, so trying to define a standard metric of success is going to prove impossible. Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a site or service is its profitability, which, unlike page views or time spent, isn't so easily gamed.

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