Remember when MTV was more about music and charts and less about teen pregnancies and glorified idiots? No? To be fair, those days ended long ago, but in its prime, MTV was a great source of discovering some hot music, and to see which tracks were burning up the charts. Today, though, there are a multitude of ways to discover music – thankfully – but where do people go for a proper top 10? Or top 100?
Sure, there are services like Billboard and iTunes to see which singles and albums are selling well, but one thing both services lack is a proper music video collection to go along with them. Yes, you can overpay for music videos through the latter, but unlike MTV of old, there’s been no proper countdown of sorts, or videoflow.
Well, thanks to YouTube (could there be a better place?), we have a new home for a “Top 100”, and akin to the videoflow just mentioned, you can stream the entire collection at will. As cool as this is on the surface, though, it’s not without potential fault. The biggest issue, of course, would be that people outside the US may not be able to view all 100 videos (as a Canadian, I know this all too well).
The biggest problem I foresee is that YouTube doesn’t seem to have an obvious methodology for ranking the top 100, although it can be assumed that it has almost everything to do with the video’s popularity that week. Unlike typical charts, which rank in terms of sales, as long as a video is popular, it seems to get ranked here. A good example of an odd placement would be Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, which has about 400,000 “likes” and 2,800,000 “dislikes”. It’s clear that this isn’t a song that will sell well, but it still ranks regardless.
Still, I kind of like the idea of a music video chart that is based on actual popularity, though i do think the likes/dislikes should be taken into consideration for the sake of accuracy.
We’re introducing the first YouTube chart to track song popularity in user-generated and professional music videos. The YouTube 100 measures song traffic across official music videos, user-uploaded videos and viral debuts, and uses this data to provide a holistic view of song popularity. The new chart is published weekly, and shines a new light on the YouTube community’s engagement and creativity.