Slacker Reinvents Format Charts With 'Slacker EQ'

Rolls Out Slacker EQ

SLACKER is rolling out "EQ Score," which the webcaster says will bring Top 40 charts into the digital world. "In a world where access to music is quickly trumping ownership, the SLACKER EQ is the most accurate reflection of a song’s trending popularity and listener engagement in today’s world of streaming music," describes SLACKER. SLACKER EQ scores will be released every THURSDAY, tracking the 40 "most engaging tracks across multiple genres from the previous week."

SLACKER SVP/Content Programming and Strategic Development JACK ISQUITH told ALL ACCESS that the genre breakdowns, include "Alternative/Indie, Hip-Hop/R&B, Country, EDM/Dance and so on. That way you can sort through things in a more traditional format way that's going to be very transparent."

Ranked from 1-100, the SLACKER EQ score measures hundreds of millions of weekly data points to show how deeply users are engaging with a particular song, based on specific positive and negative actions, including:

* Starts: the number of times a song was started on the SLACKER service
* Completes: the number of times a song was listened to in its entirety
* Hearts: the number of times a user "hearts" a track, requesting to hear it more frequently
* Shares: the number of times a user shares a track via FACEBOOK, TWITTER, GOOGLE+, TUMBLR, PINTEREST or e-mail
* Skips: the number of times a song is skipped before reaching completion
* Changes: the number of times a user changes the station when a song plays
* Bans: the number of times a song or artist is banned from playing again

"The majority of people stream music and old charting methods capture sales or basic streams which only tell a fraction of the story," ISQUITH said. "As access to music trumps ownership for consumers, engagement quickly becomes the most important metric for what’s hot and trending. SLACKER EQ provides fans, artists and labels a real-time understanding of not only what consumers are listening to, but how they’re interacting with music, and how their actions change over time."

Learn more here.

Jack Isquith Elaborates In Power Player Interview

In this week's Power Player interview, ISQUITH cited a three reasons for the creation of the EQ charts. "One reason ... is that we feel the current data out there is broken, and this is a better way of evaluating the true popularity of songs and artists," he said. "We certainly recognize that we'll get interest of the labels, managers and others in the traditional music business. We feel this data will not only be good for SLACKER, but for the music business as a whole.

"Another part of our motivation ... is to take this info and formalize our algorithm to help us program better. In the spirit of transparency, we're using this to improve our pre-programmed SLACKER stations. Now we can show what our thinking is and how we combine the human element with science from the data.

"The third thing is that this can be very interesting information for people who may not be in the traditional music business," ISQUITH continued. "This is not just for the record labels and the traditional music business interests, although we do want them to get more involved with us. We just feel this is a more thoughtful way of measuring data all around."

Read the entire interview here.

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