Sales by artist, since Magnatune started 18 months ago:
Sales by album, since Magnatune started 18 months ago:
A few things the data tell me:
1) Magnatune's sales don't follow the 80/20 rule (where 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the artists) - our sales are more evenly distributed. Maybe because this is because we have no "star" artists but I like to think it's because all our artists are on an level playing field, with visitors equally able to listen to any artist, and all the music being randomly shuffled in the playlists.
2) We have a "long tail" -- Wired Magazine's important article The Long Tail argues that there is wealth to be made with a catalog of wide breadth. While our catalog is small in comparison to Amazon's we still see a long-tail effect, with 42% of album sales revenue coming from the bottom 60% in sales rank, and only 20% of sales revenue from our top 10 albums.
3) The top grossing artists are usually those having multiple albums. Notice that in the per-artist chart, revenue is more top-heavy, with the top 10 artists taking 27% of revenue (vs 20% for the top 10 albums).
4) If this data were graphed as a bell curve, the curve should be short and wide. I looked up How to do a bell curve in Excel but it's beyond my skills. If someone feels like crunching the raw numbers and supplying me with additional charges, I'd be much obliged.
5) The data is available in source form here: by album and by artist. Note that to protect my artists' confidentiality, I'm providing percentage-of-total numbers, not absolute dollars.
FYI, music licenses show a similar pattern, with no single artist having more than 4 commercial use music license deals yet, but I don't have enough data with that yet to provide meaningful charts.
I wouldn't mind mucking with the numbers; I'd also like to see whether the distribution is 'fractal' (like a lot of things, such as traffic). Drop me an email, eh?
Posted by: Alex | May 18, 2005 at 10:47 PM