Hot Seat: Ian Wallace – Charts Manager ARIA
Record sales charts are an enduring barometer of popularity. They’re cold, numerical proof of success or failure in the fickle world of music. They serve as a yardstick for music companies to tell when they’re doing their job, or failing. Promoters will tell you they “go with their gut” when they book an act. They also study the charts. For as long as recorded music is played, charts will be compiled to gauge the big hits.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the ARIA Charts. The trade body published its first survey — then the Countdown Chart — on July 10, 1983. Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart topped the first singles chart and Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the first No. 1 on the albums chart.
For the first five years after its inception, David Kent – who’d created his own Kent Music Report — was commissioned to track sales for the ARIA Charts.
Five years on, Ian Wallace came on board.
For a quarter-century, Wallace and his team-of-four have produced the official sales charts for Australia’s record industry. Week in, week out. In that time, formats have fallen out of favour and new models have arrived. Wallace oversaw a monumental shift when, in 1997, retailers began reporting sales data electronically and a more accurate, a more “scientific” chart was created. Cock-ups do happen. None more visibly than when ARIA recently spotted a “data error” and republished an albums chart that anointed Kanye West the winner. TMN caught up with Wallace to talk charts on its historic anniversary.
How are the ARIA charts produced?
Our charts, with very few exceptions, are sales-based charts. The only charts that are not are the club chart, which is based on DJ reports, and the streaming chart. For all of those sales-based charts, we only accept data from stores that are able to give us their sales information that has been electronically generated. By that I mean scanned and electronically tracked and sent to us. That’s the way it’s been since 1997. The way we used to do it was, we’d send a couple of forms out to each retailer that was able to give us data. And it was limited by the space on the form and the amount of titles the store was prepared to count each week to see how many they’d sold. We only had four staff, so we could only key-in so much information. Now everything the store sells is in the file. We’ve gone from (collecting data from) a couple of hundred shops in the ‘80s and ‘90s to between 1,200 and 1,300 nowadays. That figure includes digital stores like iTunes and, now, streaming services. We’ve pretty much got them all. It would only be the odd shop here or there that would determine that we’re not at 100% (of representation).
What was your world like in the pre-digital era?
We just didn’t gather that sort of data. We weren’t capable of it. We would send the forms out, which was an ongoing process of negotiating with the record companies. Every week they would want their new release on the survey forms. And they’d want nothing to come off it. We’d probably have 140 singles, 140 albums that we would have on the form sent to the shops, and that would form the base. Obviously the shops would add the titles that were sold, and we’d key that in. Very few shops initially had fax machines. It would be a case of us mailing the forms out a week in advance and then on the day we’d have to call the shops and key it into the computer. It took all of the day and into the night of chart night before we were able to press a button and say, ‘We’ve got all the shops.’ And of course not all the shops were diligent in counting either. Some would report multiples of five for everything. In the new system, the stores report what they sell and there’s no human interference, basically.
How did digital reporting improve the quality of the charts?
We went to ARIA-net on February 17, 1997. When the change happened, yes, we lost a few of the indies, but we immediately picked up Brashes – as it was at the time – and some department stores. We went from 200 (information providers) to more than 330 pretty much overnight. Within six months, we were up to 1,000. Now it’s hovering around 1,200 and it has been for some years. Since we’ve gone electronic the problems are a lot rarer, because the numbers are less disputable.
What are your biggest challenges?
The big one was the 1997 change from survey-based to digital. There was a big change in 2005 when digital started becoming, particularly on the singles side, the dominant force. There was a year when physical singles were dying and the digital services hadn’t started up. And it was quite bleak on the singles chart. But digital has quickly picked-up in the last three or four years; they’ve been very robust. It’s partly because you can make the choice to just buy the track, and that still counts as a single sale.
Some artists call that “cherry-picking”.
Yes, but people are choosing what they want. It’s a truer chart than back in the old days. There used to be “double-A sides”. Which song were people buying? You wouldn’t know. Nowadays you’d know because they’d both be competing with each other in the chart.
How many charts does ARIA publish each week?
We publish different charts in different places. On our Website we’ve got 17 different charts. In the ARIA Report, which we send out via subscription, there are 20-22 charts. If you counted all the state charts, there’d be 30-40 charts each week.
The charts are evolving. You published a streaming chart late last year. And there’s been talk of a streaming albums chart. Is that still on the cards?
It’s a possibility. We’re watching what happens out there in the market, and internationally. We’re in a market-assessment situation right now. We’re watching and waiting. There are people who are keen to see it happen, so it’s likely that it will.
People would also be keen on a Hot 100-type, hybrid chart that would include streams and local YouTube views to give a picture of the biggest buzz songs.
It’s a possibility. Our current philosophy is that we’re focused on sales-based charts, but that’s not to say there can’t be another chart. I don’t think we’d be changing our sales-based chart to make it a hybrid, but there’s a possibility that a buzz-type chart might come in. There’s not been specific talk about it of late. It depends how the wind blows.
In the U.K., the Official Charts Company generates a mid-week sales chart and it builds a buzz in the media. Is ARIA looking at doing something similar?
There was a time when we weren’t capable of that, because the only stores we were collecting from were giving us sales weekly. That has changed. Now we’re getting daily files from a lot of retailers, not all of them though. We’re trying to manage the dissemination of mid-week sales. If we see things happening, we’ll send it out to key media outlets.
Do media outlets have access to sales data?
We see numbers out there from time to time. Our secure Website has a non-disclosure agreement that you have to sign before you get access to it. So, I get the feeling that they’re getting it from somebody who is disclosing something that they’re not meant to. We consider that the secure site, the data that we spent all week gathering, is valuable property. We invest a lot in that information and access to the secure site is a commercial operation on our part. And so, people taking it and using it and spreading it around devalues that product. It’s basically theft.
ARIA recently republished an albums chart which declared Kanye West’s Yeezus the No. 1. What happened?
We pride ourselves in trying to have the best charts possible. And so occasionally, if we discover there has been something going on, we will republish it. In our code of practice, it states if we’ve made an error we will republish. Or if we discover an error that’s been made by one party to a detriment to a third party, we would consider republishing. We take the information we get in good faith, which is why we put the chart out in the first place. But when questions were raised (about Adam Harvey and Troy Cassar-Daley’s The Great Country Songbook) and we then did further investigating to find out what was going on, that’s when we discovered that the bulk purchase had been made. And that’s when we decided a change had to be made to the chart. We had to recalculate on a Monday. We all had to run around that weekend.
Did you learn anything from that?
We hope so. Again, in our code of practice we ask the record companies that if they do promotions to let us know in advance so that if there’s something that does come up sounding strange we can ask for more information or go back to them and say, ‘we don’t think that fits under our rules’ and they won’t be counted. We’re trying to tighten up those rules even more.
That comes back to the big question…do the charts matter?
Of course the industry relies on them, but who cares for the charts outside the biz? People with kids. We often get requests from parents putting together a baby book and wanting to know the No. 1 on a particular date. Anybody in perpetuity who has gone into a record store has picked up a chart. Anyone who likes music, if they see a chart they’ll look at it for artists they know or like. That’s where we’re coming from. When the charts started in 1983, the primary idea was as a promotional tool. It was put out in the shops for that reason, but since we’ve gone electronic in 1997, the other side of that has come more into focus from the record companies’ perspective at least. Because we’re giving them feedback. They know how much physical stock they’re putting into the market. And our numbers coming back to them gives them a good idea of how much has sold and do they need to restock. Yes, there’s the ego factor. Yes, there’s reporting back to international company. Robin Thicke’s breakthrough was in Australia, Passenger broke here before other places. If (chart positions) are quoted by journalists, it makes people aware of the charts.
There’s a wonderful British expression — an “anorak”. It’s a geek, really. Are there Australian “chart anoraks”?
Yes, there are. In our ARIA Report we do a blurb each week about the new singles and albums in the top 100. And the “anoraks” will come back to us and point out information. They go at us every now and then. There’s one in particular who counts the number of times a certain word has appeared in a new No. 1. There are people out there and they talk to each other and they can’t wait for the new charts to come out. Which is good, because it means someone loves us.