Luminate Data, LLC (formerly MRC Data and P-MRC Data) is a provider of music and entertainment data. Established as a joint-venture in 2020, it brought together Nielsen Music, Alpha Data (formerly BuzzAngle Music) and Variety Business Intelligence (formerly TVtracker).
In December 2019, Eldridge Industries' Valence Media, then parent company of Billboard, acquired Nielsen's music data business, reuniting it with Billboard for the first time since its spin-off to E5 Global Media from Nielsen Business Media.[1] It was renamed MRC Data in 2020 after Eldridge Industries merged Valence with the film and television studio MRC. and was then brought under its PMRC joint venture with Penske Media Corporation as P-MRC Data. It was renamed once more to Luminate Data in March 2022.[2][3] In August 2022, the MRC merger was unwound, with Eldridge Industries taking sole ownership of its stake in PMRC.[4]
Nielsen Music
Nielsen Music, originally established by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett in 1991, collects music consumption and sales weekly and makes this available every Sunday (for album sales) and every Monday (for song sales) to subscribers, which include record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV companies, and artist managers. It is the source of sales information for the Billboard music charts. The company operates the analytics platform Music Connect, Music 360[5] and Broadcast Data Systems (which tracks airplay of music), the latter of which was shut down in September 2022.[6]
Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales data for Nielsen on March 1, 1991.[7] The May 25 issue of Billboard published Billboard 200 and Country Album charts based on SoundScan "piece count data",[8][9] and the first Hot 100 chart to debut with the system was released on November 30, 1991. Previously, Billboard tracked sales by calling stores across the U.S. and asking about sales—a method that was inherently error-prone and open to outright fraud. Indeed, while transitioning from the calling to tracking methods, the airplay and sales charts (already monitored by Nielsen) and the Hot 100 (then still using the calling system) often did not match (for instance Paula Abdul's "Promise of a New Day" and Roxette's "Fading Like a Flower" reached much higher Hot 100 peaks than their actual sales and airplay would have allowed them to).[10] Although most record company executives conceded that the new method was far more accurate than the old, the chart's volatility and its geographical balance initially caused deep concern, before the change and the market shifts it brought about were accepted across the industry. Tower Records, the country's second-largest retail chain, was originally not included in the sample because its stores were equipped with different technology to measure sales.[11][12] At first, some industry executives complained that the new system—which relied on high-tech sales measurement rather than store employee estimates—was based on an inadequate sample, one that favored established and mainstream acts over newcomers.[13][14]
The Recording Industry Association of America also tracks sales (or more specifically, shipments minus potential returns) on a long-term basis through the RIAA certification system; it has never used either Nielsen SoundScan or the store-calling method.
Other changes would also largely impact the Hot 100 in the future, consisting of radio-only songs being able to chart in 1998, and YouTube views playing part of how a Hot 100 is decided in 2013.
Sales data from cash registers is collected from 14,000 retail, mass merchant, and non-traditional (on-line stores, venues, digital music services, etc.) outlets in the United States, Canada, UK and Japan.
The requirements for reporting sales to Nielsen Music are that the store has Internet access and a point of sale (POS) inventory system. Submission of sales data must be in the form of a text file consisting of all the UPCs sold and the quantities per UPC on a weekly basis. Sales collected from Monday–Sunday or Sunday–Saturday are reported every Monday and made available to subscribers every Wednesday.[citation needed] Anyone selling a music product with its own UPC or ISRC may register that product to be tracked by Luminate.
Not all retailers participate in the SoundScan program, so total CD sales are projected from the collected data using a statistical calculation called "weighting". This assigns a multiplier to each category of stores, to compensate for the number of similar stores not covered by the sampling program. Sales in each category are multiplied accordingly.[15][16]
Such a system is vulnerable to exploitation if it is known which stores are included in the sampling program. To inflate their reported chart sales, some indie labels were reported to purposefully target stores in the program for on-site sales promotions.[17][18] Also, other labels were found shipping boxes of their CDs to be scanned by complicit retailers in the program.[16]
The incorporation of SoundScan tracking by the Billboard charting system was cited by the industry as a possible cause of the early '90s popularization of alternative music in the United States. An explanation floated was that the previous call system under-represented marginal genres. Under SoundScan, more accurate data on alternative music sales allowed these acts to appear higher in the Billboard charts than before, and their chart success helped increase the genre's popularity. In addition, SoundScan sales data quickly found use in the promotion departments at major record labels, to persuade radio station music directors to play tracks by high-selling alternative artists such as Nirvana.[12][19]
Alpha Data
Alpha Data (formerly, but commonly known as BuzzAngle Music) was a music analytics firm which provided statistics for the music industry, including record sales and music streaming.
TVtracker
TVtracker, founded in 1999 by Mark Hoebich, tracks and analyzes all aspects of U.S. filmed entertainment, including television, feature film and digital entertainment, with coverage of everything from pilot pickups and series orders to motion picture development and post-production. The company evolved into Variety Business Intelligence and operates as Luminate Film & TV.
DigiListan – Swedish radio programme using Nielsen SoundScan to create its statistics
Related Research Articles
The Billboard Hot 100 is the music industry standard record chart in the United States for songs, published weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on sales, online streaming, and radio airplay in the U.S.
The Billboard charts tabulate the relative weekly popularity of songs and albums in the United States and elsewhere. The results are published in Billboard magazine. Billboard biz, the online extension of the Billboard charts, provides additional weekly charts, as well as year-end charts. The two most important charts are the Billboard Hot 100 for songs and Billboard 200 for albums, and other charts may be dedicated to a specific genre such as R&B, country, or rock, or they may cover all genres. The charts can be ranked according to sales, streams, or airplay, and for main song charts such as the Hot 100 song chart, all three data are used to compile the charts. For the Billboard 200 album chart, streams and track sales are included in addition to album sales.
A record chart, in the music industry, also called a music chart, is a ranking of recorded music according to certain criteria during a given period. Many different criteria are used in worldwide charts, often in combination. These include record sales, the amount of radio airplay, the number of downloads, and the amount of streaming activity.
Billboard Year-End charts are cumulative rankings of entries in Billboard magazine charts in the United States in any given chart year. Several hundred Year-End charts are now published by Billboard, the most important of which are the single or album charts based on Hot 100 and Billboard 200 respectively.
Broadcast Data Systems was a service that tracks radio, television and internet airplay of songs. The service, which is a unit of MRC Data, is a contributing factor to North American charts published by co-owned magazine Billboard, including the Billboard Hot 100 and Canadian Hot 100, when combined with sales and streaming data from Soundscan.
The Canadian Singles Chart was a chart compiled by the American-based music sales tracking company, Nielsen SoundScan, which began publication in November 1996. It was published every Wednesday and also published on Thursday by Jam!/Canoe. The chart also appeared in Billboard until March 2006, when Billboard stopped publishing the Canadian Singles Chart in favor of the Canadian Digital Songs Sales Chart. Billboard later introduced their own singles chart for Canada, the Canadian Hot 100, on June 7, 2007.
Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums is a music chart published weekly by Billboard magazine that ranks R&B and hip hop albums based on sales in the United States and is compiled by Luminate. The chart debuted as Hot R&B LPs in the issue dated January 30, 1965, in an effort by the magazine to further expand into the field of rhythm and blues music. It then went through several name changes, being known as Soul LPs in the 1970s and Top Black Albums in the 1980s, before returning to the R&B identification in 1990 and affixing a hip hop designation in 1999 to reflect the latter's growing sales and relationship to R&B during the decade.
MRC II Distribution Company, L.P., doing business as MRC, is an American film and television studio. Founded by Mordecai (Modi) Wiczyk and Asif Satchu, the company funds and produces film and television programming.
Regional Mexican Albums is a genre-specific record chart published weekly by Billboard magazine in the United States. The chart was established in June 1985 and originally listed the top twenty-five best-selling albums of mariachi, tejano, norteño, and grupero, all subgenres of regional Mexican music. The genre is considered by musicologists as "the biggest-selling Latin music genre in the United States", and represented the fastest-growing Latin genre in the United States after tejano music entered the mainstream market during its 1990s golden age.
↑ S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement, Beacon Press, August 15, 2006, ISBN0-8070-0986-5
↑ Holden, Stephen (June 5, 1991). "The Pop Life". New York Times. Archived from the original on April 17, 2023.
↑ "Chart Beat Chat". Billboard. July 23, 2004. Archived from the original on September 29, 2013. Retrieved November 9, 2013.
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