Global Reggae Charts - Issue #2 / June 2017

editorial
Welcome to the second edition of the Global Reggae Charts. As is the case with every new service
in beta, we are still experimenting and optimizing all aspects of the charts. I believe we made significant
progress over the last month.
Before I go into details, allow me a general remark: charts are only valuable if you can trust them.
An essential ingredient to that trust is understanding how they work. Therefore, transparency is
very high on our priority list. Thus, I’ll use this space to update you about changes we’ve made and
challenges we face. So, what’s new since last month?
First, we adjusted the maximum age of songs and albums that qualify for the charts. New entries
mustn‘t be older than six months (as indicated by the official release date), releases already in the
#2
charts can remain there up until one year after their release. In the first voting round, we encountered
several considerably older releases. Since the charts are intended as a guide based on contemporary
relevance - not all time greatness - we think the change will help. We are aware the decision
might come with its own set of implications. It’s for instance possible to have a sleeper tune that
gains significance over time. We are going to monitor the situation closely and adjust when necessary.
We also made an update in the usability area. Voters now see a list of all the songs from past votings
that qualify (see point above). It is a long list of all the songs that received at least one vote.
It makes voting easier. The risk is that we create a bias towards using songs from that list. But we
think that’s negligible: we list every qualified song, regardless of the number of votes it received.
Again: it’s a long list. It contained 183 songs - after only one month of voting, with a limited number
of voters. We think it’s a fair trade-off between usability and equal opportunity.
The results so far seem to support that: singles voting this month had roughly 100 new entries -
which equates to 54% of first-time songs. And we had 20 first-time albums (34%). This trend is also
reflected in the actual charts: the album charts have four new entries - a 30% turnover rate - and
the single charts have 12 new entries (60%). Three top 20 singles didn’t receive any votes before.
It’s a higher turnover than we expect in the long-run, once the voter base has reached a decent
scale.
This leads to the final point: While voter turnout increased by 52%, we are still talking about a far
from representative sample. That said, thanks to the support of our media partners and several
radio stations, the charts are “on the map” now. We are looking forward to increased voter participation
over the next months and are very optimistic that we are working on a very useful service
for the global reggae community. I hope you are too. As always: any feedback is much appreciated!
Cheers
Thomas
Thomas Euler is founder of the German reggae & dancehall blogazine
whagwaan-magazine.de
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global reggae charts | issue 2 / june 2017