NYU recently released a study on the market impact of blogs on record sales, which is not a new topic of discussion but I’ve yet to see a funded academic research program that yielded any significant results. While NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar’s work may not be entirely conclusive, it’s an example of someone outside the music industry really investigating the value of user-generated content in the marketability and saleability of an album. Since blogs and online chatter are the radio promotion and big-bucks marketing of the indie community, it’s interesting to take a peek at what Dhar’s research has uncovered:

• When legitimate blog posts exceeded a threshold of 40 before an album’s release, sales were three times the average.
• If the albums blogged about were associated with a major record label, sales increased five-fold.
• When blog activity reached more than 250 posts, sales were six times the average regardless of an association with a major or independent label.
• The number of an artist’s MySpace friends also contributed to higher future sales, but had a weaker correlation as compared to blog chatter.

He also looked to social networking sites like Myspace to compile data about an album’s impact on the Interwebs, taking into account numbers of “friends” and plays of an artist’s songs in the weeks leading up to an album release.

The entire paper is available for peeping here, and it’s worth a couple of minutes on a Friday to check out how your own online movements might be affecting the music business as a whole.

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