Culture Notes

Measuring the hits

The entertainment industry is realizing that its ways of measuring the popularity of music recordings and TV shows has serious flaws. Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart has been the prime certifier of number-one records for nearly 50 years. Based on a combination of record sales and radio airplay, the chart is susceptible to flagrant manipulation. One practice of record labels is to discount singles, which normally sell for $4.99 for a CD and $2.99 for a cassette, to as low as 49 cents, or sometimes even a penny. Such releases naturally sell more than their competitors. Disc jockeys, in turn, assume their listeners want to listen to such a hot-selling single and therefore play it more often. As a result, the song climbs up the charts. Once it becomes a certified hit, though by manipulation of the system, the recording attracts even more fashion-conscious consumers, bolstering the lucrative sale of albums and concert tickets. Billboard is devising a new system in an attempt to correct the abuses. The Nielsen ratings, which track the performance of television shows, are also undergoing scrutiny. The practice of determining ratings on the basis of the percentage of television sets tuned to a particular program fails to take into consideration the number of people actually watching the program. As a result, viewers of family-oriented shows in particular are significantly undercounted. When a family of five watches a program together, it has five times the viewership of a sex-and-violence miniseries watched by a single teenager. But the Nielsen system counts them exactly the same, since it counts TV sets rather than viewers. Attempts to change the rating system with the help of new technology are being studied. A system that more accurately measures how many viewers a program reaches may well give networks a huge incentive to turn out programs that whole families would enjoy watching together.