The Eminem Show reached #2

May 28, 2002 1:11 PM

The Eminem Show reached #2 on the Gracenote charts last week, even though the album was not officially released until Sunday. Gracenote doesn't give exact figures on traffic, but it said the No. 2 slot in its charts represented a total figure of listeners in the "mid-tens of thousands" over the course of the week.
posted by ry (15 comments total)

it's a solid disc, i wouldnt be surprised if it stays up there all summer.

many times, sales rankings for new records are based on sell-in to retailers.

em + dre = $$$
posted by tsarfan at 1:33 PM on May 28, 2002

The company's database examines CDs' tables of contents down to slices just one-seventy-fifth of a second long. Copies that look identical at that scale almost always come from the same master copy, the company says.

So, while the RIAA is trying to crack down on filesharing services (and succeeding), there are still over ten-thousand copies of the album that originated elsewhere. It is not mentioned in the article, but I am assuming that the bootlegged CDs are made from promo copies of the album that were released to radio stations and retailers.
posted by ry at 1:34 PM on May 28, 2002

tsarfan: Each "listen" in the Gracenote charts comes from a physical CD that is in your computer's CDROM drive. Winamp, Itunes, and other players use the CDDB(Gracenote) to get song information based on the CD's track layout. Since those programs usually store the information on your hard drive, they only contact the server once per unique CD. These charts have nothing to do with retailers.
posted by ry at 1:40 PM on May 28, 2002

right on, ry, my bad.

what id like to do is get my hands on these freaks who loop ten seconds of the song for 3-4 minutes thus making you feel like you're downloading the full song, when in actuality you're downloading something that will make you hate the song forever.

it took me a full 4 hours to find all the real complete tracks from "The Show."

royal pain in the hard drive.

If Em's record becomes a smash hit it should give the RIAA a little pause from attacking the file-sharing services. Becuase it will show that people simply want to listen to the cd before they buy it and make an informed descision, and that many people who download actually purchase the disc if it's good.

I paid full pop for the new Weezer cd the day the record came out at an independent record store because i was able to go to the band's web site and download most of the tracks well before the release date.

I like that cd and the Eminem cd so much i will be purchasing more of them as gifts.
posted by tsarfan at 1:48 PM on May 28, 2002

retailers broke street on eminem something fierce. i know here in albuquerque, everyone had it on sale on friday.

here is a sample phone conversation, between my sister (marion berry pie) and myself, while toiling away at two rival music retailers.

time: friday evening

sugarfish: "dude, what are you doing?"
marion berry pie: "you guys are the only people in town not breaking street on the eminem."
sf: "what?"
mbp: "i've been everywhere."

fin.

therefore and thus, it was on sale at least on friday, if not earlier.

sorry to be longwinded; i've been wanting to tell the story since then. hehe.
posted by sugarfish at 1:59 PM on May 28, 2002

Eminem was the most searched for artist on Gnutella in a little 3-hour search log I made yesterday... For what it's worth...

In terms of all searches, he came in right above "teen mpg", "preteen jpg", "xxx mpg", and "spiderman"... Geeze, what kind of perverts search for "spiderman"?
posted by whatnotever at 2:43 PM on May 28, 2002

Nasty, non law-abiding-too-cheap-to-go-down-to-the-cinema style ones. Either that or people with a really, really creative imagination (hey, you get all sorts of odd stuff floating around the 'net these dayz..).

Interesting to note that A New Day Has Come is at number 7 - despite killing Macs and refusing to run on other PCs.. Curious..

Ooh! Lookie! Its number 1 now - I bet this news story got people up and searching around..
posted by Mossy at 4:03 PM on May 28, 2002

The number of queries for "The Eminem Show" is also highly increased in the correspondent mIRC chatrooms too (#mp3, #fullmp3,etc.).

For what it's worth, downloading this album via Audiogalaxy was (and still is, despite the "restrictions") a breeze, and it was fast too (it usually takes 3 hours to download a full album, this one took about 2:15 - I'm on 64kbps).

PS: (I was just wondering the other day:) does Dre have to ever work again as a singer, now that he's got Eminem? I mean... that guy is money in the bank.
posted by kchristidis at 4:32 PM on May 28, 2002

breaking street date use to be a big no-no back when I worked at the video store.
posted by Mick at 5:21 PM on May 28, 2002

retailers broke street on eminem something fierce. i know here in albuquerque, everyone had it on sale on friday.

Same here. Every store (3) I went into on Saturday had a stack on the counter selling them to whoever walked in the door and asked about it.
posted by BarneyFifesBullet at 9:18 PM on May 28, 2002

mick: breaking street date use to be a big no-no back when I worked at the video store.

it IS a big no-no, but if you're not the first in an area to do it, companies don't do anything. you have to protect your business, you know.

contrast this with the harry potter release yesterday. everyone was scared shitless to break street, and as far as i know no one here in town did. because sony would spank anyone who did it.

and i also heard there wasn't such a problem breaking street this time because eminem was crying about the record being available online.
posted by sugarfish at 10:06 PM on May 28, 2002

I'd imagine distributors get mighty cheesed when the album turns up sooner than advertised, but what are the penalties for "breaking street"? Getting reprimanded? Blacklisted? Shot?

Anyways, I remember September 11 being an anticipated day for me, as it was when the new They Might Be Giants album was supposed to be released... Needless to say, my joy was drained from that.
posted by Down10 at 10:26 PM on May 28, 2002

'Without Me', the first single from the new album, is incredibly weak. If it weren't for the video being so entertaining, I don't think anyone would take this thing seriously. Quite possibly the weakest beats and sorriest rhymes I've ever heard. What is this from, a 4 track recorder and a 19.99 casio from wal mart?

And the subject matter is getting a little tiresome (eminem is super duper, the last 3 people to question his relevance are "fags"...etc.) He implies that no one listens to Moby in the song, which is a little ridiculous since EVERYONE listens to Moby in one form or another - his last album was sold part and parcell to commercial interests.

Sorry to derail the thread. This album will be the best seller all summer, and this is dreadfully depressing to me.
posted by glenwood at 6:18 AM on May 29, 2002

I don't think that most of the listens for the album came from people breaking the street date on Saturday, but from bootleggers. I think the figures were tallied on Friday or even before.

In the case of the Eminem CD, eight slightly different versions accounted for most of the traffic. That means there's likely "eight major guys doing most of the pressing of this," Hyman said.

Los Angeles was the top listening location, and New York was second, Hyman said. The company hasn't crunched the numbers enough to figure out whether each location had its own dominant version of the bootleg, he said.

This is quite interesting. It seems that in the future labels could release promos to radio stations that have slightly altered TOCs. They could then track where the bootlegs originated.
posted by ry at 6:22 AM on May 29, 2002

Another interesting thing about this article was that it made me go and look at the differences between the charts at gracenote(cddb) and freedb. Not too shocking, but there are some differences. I was expecting more of a dichotomy, like the one between Billboard and CMJ.
posted by ry at 6:41 AM on May 29, 2002