October 16, 2006

Berklee has become one of only two music business programs in the country that has a license to use Nielsen SoundScan's information system in the college's Music Business/Management classes. Nielsen SoundScan's data determines the outcome of the Billboard music charts, and the company provides real time tracking of music sales to record labels, artists, managers, advertisers, and radio stations.

SoundScan offered the system to selected academic institutions at a small fraction of the normal price, and Berklee was chosen partly as a result of professor Peter Alhadeff's work with Trudy Lartz, SoundScan's Vice President of Sales, who has been a guest speaker in Alhadeff's E-Commerce and Statistics classes.

SoundScan, the industry-wide standard in retail data management, allows record labels to adjust marketing plans for their releases and rush CD shipments to neighborhoods on-demand. Armed with this information, the students are analyzing marketing plans and making an educated guess about adjustments that labels may make, based on that week's data. Alhadeff hopes that in tracking the geographical sales profiles of emerging artists, his students may be able to act as a focus group to advise labels on their marketing strategies.

The service is currently being used in Data Management and Statistics, and will soon be integrated into other Berklee classes, including Record Company Operations, Heavy Rotation Records, and new courses anticipated over the next few years. Students are using SoundScan to track the weekly sales progress of major label releases, allowing them to do up-to-the-minute case studies of new CDs, including Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Bob Dylan, and Pat Metheny/Brad Mehldau, as well as tracking of artists like Panic at the Disco, Iron Maiden, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and others that have been chosen especially by the students.  

The effects have been immediate, giving the students an appreciation of the value of real time data in the music business, and improved awareness about rankings in the top two Billboard Charts—the Billboard 200 and the Billboard Hot 100. Says Alhadeff, "In many cases, we have found out that digital pre-sales of records prime the market ahead of a release. It is truly amazing to see the mass consumption behind a record such as Justin Timberlake's, which went from a few thousand units to over six hundred thousand in two weeks."

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Margot Edwards
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