It’s strange how things all come together sometimes. For the past couple of days I have been listening to the audio presentations from the TED Conference (Mitch Joel – I will not stop until I have a beer with you at TED, and I don’t give a damn if it’s in 2037). Tony Robbins was speaking about what gives meaning to life and he broke it into 6 needs (a new Maslow, if you will). Four were base needs to survive, the upper two were spiritual – the need to grow and the need to give.
Instantly this focused the understanding of my fascination with Bum Rush the Charts. It’s a chance to grow and try to figure out the puzzle that is iTunes without being able to see behind the curtain. With the proceeds going towards a scholarship the effort has a higher meaning.
I also had two other threads weave together. Seth Godin made a lasting impact when I was listening to him months ago on Across the Sound. He refused to criticize a campaign because he said that at least the group was trying, the only people that deserved criticism were those who didn’t do anything, or took the safe route (he goes further to say that safe is the new risky). Since then I have made an effort to not criticize those who are brave enough to try something new. This echoed back to me today listening to Adam Curry on the DSC. It’s easy for people to complain, those are the people you don’t need to hang out with – spend your time with people who make an effort to do something.
So enough with the sermon – what have we learned? Rock is weak, the number 1 track in rock is number 5 overall, but it tails off quickly – only the top 12 or so tracks make it into the top 100 overall. Hip-Hop and Pop run the charts *groan*
Mine Again will continue to rise up in the charts. I’m going to put some chips down here. It appears that the track only moved once, it wasn’t on the chart and then everything moved around 11am Eastern. My theory is that the scoring is a 7-day moving average. Chris says that the landing page had over 10k hits, let’s say only half bought the track. I find it difficult to believe that more than 5,000 people bought Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me during the same period (and that’s hard for me to say as I believe that could be one of the 5 greatest singles of all time). Assuming there wasn’t some kind of Def Leppard the Charts going on that I didn’t know about, we’d say it was a normal day for that track and if it did beat the bum rush there would be over 2 million iPods or more with this hot track from Hysteria on it.
I think we can safely presume that the track may actually be penalized right now for squeezing all the buys into a single day (in theory the total sales today divided by the length of the measuring cycle – i.e. if it’s 7 days we are only seeing 1/7th of the total impact as the previous 6 days are much closer to zero). Check out Christopher Penn’s latest update to see if I’ve still got the J-Funk.
Talk to you tomorrow.