Academic Charts Online: International Popular Music (review)

Until the launch of Academic Charts Online: International Popular Music (ACO) in June 2012, any project requiring the ability to extract and compare charting data for sound recording sales was a labor-intensive and often bleak prospect. Of course, Billboard data have long been available to some patrons via local subscriptions of print and microfilm editions and more recently electronically, including via the Billboard site and through Google Books,¹ while Cash Box holdings are more limited in libraries but now available online as well.² The Official Charts Company provides electronic access to a subset of British charting data via their Web site,³ and dedicated scholars have compiled much charting data in books.⁴ Users hoping to collect, compare, and analyze sales and charts data over time could certainly gather some of that information manually using such sources, but the introduction of ACO facilitates that work for the user, provides tools for analysis, and adds much more data than have traditionally been collectively available in library collections.

ACO currently includes chart data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Spain, Australia, and Mexico from a variety of sources authorized by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.⁵ Coverage dates and chart types vary by location. For the U.S. and Canada, Billboard data represent all of the included information, with U.S. singles going back to 1956 and U.S. albums to 1985 (with eventual album backfill to 1955), and Canada going back to 1996. U.K. data come from Official Charts, beginning in 1952. Media Control provides German and Spanish data going back to 1977 and 2003, respectively. Australian data come from ARIA (back to 1988), and Mexican data from Nielsen Music Airplay (back to 1999). In each of these areas, coverage generally differs for singles charts, album charts, genre charts, and so on. New data arrive weekly, although one provider has a short embargo before the data appears in ACO with an average of only about a week’s lag time for the majority of the content. These data are presented as a searchable database with tools to create analytics that allow the user to compare charting positions by artist, title (singles and albums), countries in which titles charted, label, and more.

ACO personnel come from backgrounds in electronic publishing and databases, with additional experience in the music industry, so they approach this project with expertise and enthusiasm; for example, they started Classical Music Library as one of the pioneers of streaming music for libraries. An advisory board made up of librarians and academics helps guide the development of the product and supplements this expertise.

Functionality

ACO’s approach to controlled vocabulary mirrors the predictive search mechanism in Google and, as such, will seem familiar to many users. When one begins a search, potential results display just below the search box; the user selects the desired search term from the controlled list to populate the search box. If no suggestions appear once a complete name or title is entered, there are no data for that search term. The predictive results will include a combination of possible result types. For instance, a search beginning with “Elliott” will suggest Missy Elliott, Carol Elliott, Elliott Smith, William Elliott Whitmore, and others as artist searches, as well as albums and singles by each of these artists. Adding “Smith” to the search narrows possible searches including an artist search (“Elliott Smith”), four album searches (with manufacturer name and number for each), and five single searches (with label name). Suggestions appear only for complete words (in the above example, for instance, if one pauses after typing “Ellio,” the suggestion box will indicate that there are “no matches”).

A title search will yield results linked specifically to an artist. For instance, searching, “L.O.V.E.” offers suggestions of “L.O.V.E.” by Ashlee...