Billboard 200: The Lessons of Musical Success in the U.S.

Abstract

There has been little quantitative analysis of the successful careers of music artists in the literature given the importance of music in world culture. The Billboard 200 database in the U.S. (BB200, 200 best-selling weekly albums) is freely available for the period 1963–2019, a long period encompassing the entire careers of many musicians. An analysis of this database enabled us to establish some rules of musical success for artists, which are examined in this article. Our results show that the time distribution of success for artists reaching high chart positions follows a Frechet-like distribution, with a decline principally due to the progressively shorter lifespan of successive charted albums from the same artist. We then show that the surmised difficulty of the second album exists. Our findings also confirm that success is more diverse than it was a few decades ago, in the sense that more artists reach the charts every year. Finally, we analyze and model the lifespan of albums in the charts, facilitating the isolation of the contribution of marketing to success and failure and comparisons between albums. The BB200 database provides an interesting point of entry to music data science, music marketing, but also to the more complex related notions of musical quality and creativity.