Who knows about the digital music software GIANTS 'Gracenote'? What about cddb? No? Still scratching your heads?
Well if you have ever used itunes or winamp to rip a CD and then had all the track names mysteriuosly appear over the cyberspace, complete with details of genre, artist, year etc; then you have come into contact with Gracenote!
Gracenote keeps a database of virtually every record ever released (at least since the digital revolution). They catagorise all the essential elements of the music and then when you insert a CD into your computer the database is accessed at lightning speed to identify the disc and send a packet of information back to your computer to update the names, clever isn't it?
Not to miss out on the whole charts thing Gracenote or cddb as it's otherwise known has launch its own chart. Instead of going on sales the chart calculates what people are downloading or uploading onto their computers. This means if I buy a CD then loan it to 4 friends who also upload the CD to their computers; then it would come up on their database 5 times. The initial sales chart picks up 1 sale as I was the only person to buy the CD, but the gracenote chart picks this up as 5 instances. The significance of this is that it becomes easy to track trends in what people are listening to and happens over a sustained period.
I think it's a very useful chart for getting a feel of what is coming and going out of fashion, a CD that has in effect left the sales chart can remain in the listeners chart for a great deal longer and so reveals the true shelf life of a given album
here is a link to a world map of listening trends, just click on a country and see the top 10! You can browse from this page to some more conventional chart views.
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