Soundscan, Loudbytes Rolling Revenues From Merch Into Charts

In the past couple of years, Soundscan has taken some lumps across the industry. There are people who claim that the charts, which were once read with breathless anticipation every week by everybody in the music industry, are no longer relevant because they fail to tell the whole story.

An announcement made today hints that they’re making an attempt to change their image.

Nielsen has entered into agreement with Loudbytes, a company that company that connects digital music and media to physical merchandise. Under the agreement, loudbyte music download codes will be attached to a plethora of merchandise.  Each code is redeemable online for a digital music single, EP, or album specific to each artist and their merch. Once the codes are redeemed, sales will be counted via Nielsen’s Soundscan. Loudbytes started reporting sales to SoundScan in April and its products are currently sold by a growing number of artists.

Rather than trying to assign value to intangible digital products, Loudbytes is allowing artists to frame digital music as a feature or component of the purchase of a physical product.  This is an interesting route around the issue of people’s trouble with assigning value to music downloads and other intellectual property (which was alluded to in “The Freeloaders”), but what Soundscan and Loudbytes are doing raises an important question:

Will artists take the download codes into account when pricing their merchandise?

If not, then this is technically another instance in which artists are giving away music for free.  T-shirts and coffee mugs are great things for musicians to sell, but that doesn’t mean they should do so at the expense of their recorded music.

Concerns about the value of digital music aside, this partnership does give Soundscan a means of counting music purchases that are not recorded music.  Artists are selling more and more merchandise, and incorporating those sales into their chart rankings gives them a new shot at relevance. Hopefully the value of digital music won’t slide further down along the way.

Tagged as: downloads, Loudbytes, merchandise, Soundscan