Nothing But the Stats

Greetings Yahoo! Music mavens, audio auteurs, and digital divas. James the Yahoo! Butler here, not to serve up with diligence and vim the weekly playlist haps, as that is the domain of the venerable Radish, but to apprise you stat-wise how Yahoo Music Unlimited (YMU sounds so much better than USC and UCLA, isn’t it?) continues to bring you the newest of the new music when you want it, how you want it.

How best to quantify this? Oh, come on, admit it, you like these numbers. It’s like comparing your SAT scores with your chums at Starbucks at lunch. Heaven forbid that a butler should deign to formulate a mission statement. My services tend toward the mundane and the pedestrian. My task here (butlers have tasks, they’re tactical; strategy falls to the milords and miladies whom they serve): I want to show you how we stack up in terms of content against the competition. It is like college football, isn’t it? The competition? There’s iTunes, duh, not to mention Rhapsody. Mostly we compete against ourselves. With all due respect to John Donne, Yahoo Music is an island unto itself. There’s always room to improve our service to you.

The content? It made the most sense to compare YMU’s holdings to a neutral benchmark against which no one could cry foul. We chose both Billboard’s Top 200 as well as the College Musical Journal 200, each of which come out monthly. Anyone have a problem with that? Good.

In addition to benchmark comparisons, the Butler will discuss the Weekly New Releases.

Please note that published results do not reflect Yahoo’s subsequent to-publication efforts to secure digital rights to albums and songs. That number will improve over time. The goal? A moving target of 100%.

For those who wonder where these lists come from – we don’t pull them from thin air, for heaven’s sake - here are the nuts and bolts. Those findings you can verify yourself. We take a snapshot of the Billboard 200 on the 3rd Thursday on each month and the College Music Journal on the 4th Friday. The in-house Yahoo!-generated New Releases list comes out each Friday which we then combine with Monday’s list of priority new releases to create a master Weekly New Releases list that we publish on Tuesday. We layer those three lists with comparisons to iTunes and Rhapsody in terms of downloadability and/or streamability as well as audio quality. (Disclaimer: we just search YMU, iTunes and Rhapsody as any consumer would for the titles so it’s certainly possible we made a mistake or that the music has entered their catalog since our comparison. we make every effort to be accurate, though.)
Because the various comparisons represent static representations – a digital snapshot – of a moment in time, the Butler will also discuss dynamic representations when appropriate, when significant, when interesting that will show how we move over time in terms of percentages of songs captured, how we’re moving over time head to head with the competition.

Finally, just for your listening pleasure, a link to the playlist(s) under discussion will accompany each Butler blog.

For this first entry I tender a trayful of tasty tidbits and soundbytes.

College Music Journal 200
(released August 14, 2006)

• Of the 200 albums, at this writing we offer complete rights for all tracks on 135 of the albums. That’s 68%. Factoring in the 29 albums that are not available on any other service that percentage jumps up to 75%.
• Here’s a link to a playlist of the CMJ Top 50

Billboard 200
(as of July 8, 2006)

• Of the 200 albums, we offer at this writing 180 albums for download/purchase. That’s a whopping 90%. iTunes strums in at 170 albums, for 85%.
• Yahoo offers 2632 tracks (89%), while iTunes follows with 2587 (88%)
• At this writing, in terms of tracks available for streaming and subscription download, Yahoo offers 150 full albums (75%) with 2373 available tracks (81%) while Rhapsody lags behind with 147 (74%) and 2383 (also 81%) respectively.
• Here’s a link to a playlist of the BB50

New Releases
(August 8, 2006)

• This week we tracked 42 new releases. As of this writing, we offer 39 (93%) for Download Coverage while iTunes offers 36 (89%).
• At this writing, in terms of Tracks on Demand, we offer 34 full albums (81%) while Rhapsody only offers 29 (69%).
• We list 368 available tracks (75%) while Rhapsody offers 359 (74%).
• Here’s a link to this week’s playlist

New Releases
(August 15, 2006)

• This week we tracked 33 new releases. As of this writing, we offer 32 (97%) for Download Coverage while iTunes offers only 27 (82%).
• At this writing, in Terms of Tracks on Demand, we offer 28 albums (85%), Rhapsody offers 21 (64%).
• Here’s a link to this week’s playlist

New Releases
(August 22, 2006)

• This week we tracked 39 new releases. As of this writing, we offer 32% (82%) for Download Coverage while iTunes trails with 30 (77%).
• At this writing, in Terms of tracks on Demand, we offer 30 albums (77%), Rhapsody offers 28 (72%).
• Here’s a link to this week’s playlist

Did you notice any patterns or at least a glaring tendency? Right, just one. Over this period of time YMU consistently outperformed iTunes and Rhapsody in terms of downloadable and streamable songs. Just as one swallow does not a summer make, neither do three weeks of New Releases a dynasty make. Not bad. Stay tuned though, for as Tony Bennett, the Jose Gonzalez of my generation crooned, the best is yet to come.

James Scarborough
Yahoo! Music Butler