Nielsen SoundScan has added new Digital Song Genre Reports to its cache of services. These reports are based on the Digital Song Genre Charts that debuted in early-2010 in a partnership with Billboard.
These reports offer a new capabilities such as the ability to break music sales down by genre market share and detailed DMA (Designated Market Area) genre reports. Genre designations are key understanding market trends within the music industry.
“Nielsen SoundScan’s new digital song genre capabilities are an additional tool to help our label and retail partners market and sell music,” said David Bakula, Sr. VP Nielsen Entertainment. “Genre data provides an important context with analyzing digital track data in terms of artist sales as well as the broader trends at both the label and national levels.”
Some of the data the new report generated include digital song sales by genre. In 2010, for example, the report found that Rock was the most popular genre with a 27% market share, followed by Pop at 25.4%, and R&B/Hip-Hop with a 21.9% share.
Also broken down is the percentage of catalog sales, with rock having much higher back catalog sales (72.4%) than the more hit-driven genre Rap (33.9%), in which the majority of sales are newer releases.
The Digital Song Genre Report has 27 digital song genres overall and 16 core genres in each classification broken down by Overall, Current, & Catalog sales. Current includes digital songs released in 2009 or 2010; Catalog includes digital songs released prior to 2009. More than five million songs have been coded with genres to date.
Nielsen offers two levels of genre categorization — Core Genre and overall Genre. Core is the primary genre for any given song (a song may only have one core genre assignment) and overall Genre, which allows for digital songs to cross multiple genres simultaneously in order to better evaluate a song’s overall performance in the current market.