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"New York University's Stern Business School's Professor Vasant Dhar and Elaine Chang, a former student, have released the results of a study that proves online word-of-mouth can be used as a good predictor of a music albums sales numbers.  They did not have any way to measure if the online chatter actually influenced more sales, but as a prediction of sales numbers, it turned out to be an excellent gauge.\nJacqui Cheng of Ars Technica said yesterday that the researchers couldn't afford the record sales reports from Nielsen SoundScan, so they instead turned to the best indicator of all sales they could find online: Amazon sales ranks.  Then to follow the online chatter, they monitored what was being said on blogs, and also how many friends the band(s) had on MySpace.  They did this for 108 albums at the beginning of 2007, and followed a mixture of independent releases as well as those from the big four record labels.\nThe results aren't terribly surprising, but they did find that the more friends an artist's MySpace account had, the higher the album sales.  As for blog posts, if an independent release got at least 40 blog posts from everyday people (not marketing blogs), they saw sales at three times the normal.  For the big four labels, 40 blog posts would show a five-fold sales increase, but to get to a six-fold increase, it took 250 or more blog posts.\nWhile all of this somewhat fascinating, it's kinda got the smell of a \"Well...DUH!\" moment.  Of course online mentions are going to correlate to higher sales. The Web is a natural facilitator of word-of-mouth.\nWhile it is still interesting to see actual proof of the viral marketing concept, I think the world already knew it worked this way.    The more a product is in front of a consumer, the higher the sales. Of course, as we already said, there is no indicator if these numbers show that new buyers were influenced, but as a sign of how sales will do on an album, this study's finding doesn't come as much of a shock."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/02/10/word-of-mouth-record-sales/>