On the 8th of November 2022, TurnTable Charts, (the standard music aggregator of chart data in Nigeria) launched the Top 50 Albums Chart, the last of its three standard music charts, that also includes the Nigeria Top 100 singles chart and the Artistes chart. The album chart is supposed to depict a comprehensive overview of the consumption of albums across streaming platforms, Radio & TV.
The arrival of a veritable album charting system couldn’t have come at a better time, with the dawn of a new album era upon us. In the past two years or thereabout, artists, labels and fans alike have resorted to using Apple Music, mostly as a metric for tangible mainstream consumption and acceptance.
During the 2020 lockdown, when the trend started—it seemed harmless and worked to an extent to give an insight of what consumer taste was like. But over the years, it began to get upheld as some veritable standard for singles and albums alike. The unhealthy pedestal artists were accruing to the DSP in question, would then spill onto fans and stans and become an irate obsession used to judge success and peddle agendas against opposing rivals and fanbase.
As at 2020, Apple Music had over 100,000 subscribers in Nigeria. When Spotify launched a year later, that figured dropped to 80,000. In a country that boasts of a population of 200 million, half of which is the young adult age demographic that’s the primary consumers of secular music, definitely anyone can see how using a DSP with 80,000 subscribers to gauge a music scene comprising of 80–100 million population is very problematic. Matter of fact, half of that demographic are yet to climb on board the streaming train. Streaming has indeed been on an upward trajectory over the past few years, but majority of Nigerians still download music for free on blogs.
It’s no wonder then how a body of work could amass massive numbers on various DSP’s and fail to make little mark on the actual mainstream. The project in question would top year-end charts for the year under review and would fail to generate any glee or enthusiasm, when songs off it came on in public spaces in the mainstream from listeners. Almost as if the success in question existed in a bubble. Is that to say that the healthy numbers don’t reflect tangible mainstream success? Not at all. It’s just one part of it and doesn’t exactly paint the full picture.
In a country where the huge bulk of its primary music market downloads music for free and sections of its secondary market don’t even have access to internet, streaming data can’t be placed on the same pedestal that it is in the western world. Hence, that makes Radio & TV impressions all the more valuable—especially radio, as it’s the most reflective of tangible mainstream penetration and popularity of a song. The biggest songs of the year did a madness on radio impressions, as that’s the zenith of reach as far as the country is concerned.
Combining Radio & TV impressions with streaming data, thus paints the ideal picture that provides invaluable information and analytics. That’s what TurnTable chart is aiming to do with the newly launched Top 50 Album charts and its working mechanisms in fact mirror the universal standards being utilized in the more developed music industries. It would be imploring the formula of 1500 on-demand audio and/or video streams = 1 album sale.
The chart would also comprise of sub-genre denominations that would rank albums in accordance to their performance in their respective genres. Afro-Pop, Street-Pop, Afro-R&B, Hip-Hop, Gospel, Traditional, alternative etc are amongst the major genres in question, which charts would be in play in the coming weeks.
Asake (Street-POP), Bella Shmurda (Afro-Pop), Mercy Chinwo (Gospel), Blaqbonez (Hip-Hop), Johnny Drille (Afro-R&B), Ckay (Alternative) and The Cavemen. (Traditional) are the first artiste’s with No. 1 albums on these genre charts, with Asake’s Mr. Money With The Vibe at the zenith of the main aggregate chart, becoming the first album to achieve this feat with 10,000 album unit sales in the week of tracking.
Bella Shmurda’s Hypertension starts at No. 2 with 6,732 units, equaling 10.1 million on-demand streams of the set’s tracks. Burna Boy’s Love, Damini earned 4,410 units to start at No. 3. The rest of the top five is completed by albums from Chocolate City; Young Jonn’s Love Is Not Enough at No. 4 (3,681 units) and Blaqbonez’s Young Preacher at No. 5 (3,337 units).
Seyi Vibez’s debut album, Billion Dollar Baby earned 3,151 units off two days of availability during the tracking week to start at No. 6. Ayra Starr’s 19 & Dangerous (Deluxe) occupies the No. 7 spot with 2,828 units, while Black Sherif’s The Villain I Never Was earned 2,279 units to start at No. 8.
Rounding out the top ten; Fireboy DML’s Playboy ranks at No. 9 – it earned 2,214 units while Omah Lay’s Boy Alone earned 1,796 units to rank at No. 10.
You can see the full chart here.
Major record labels and artists have already started to adopt comprehensive data provided by Turntable, although the false god complex that the Apple Music charts services—is yet to debunked, but it’s a gradual process. It’s only a matter of time before tangible information would be held in the light of what it truly is. And biased one, subject to the select few of listeners’ preferences on DSP goes extinct.
We at Album Talks implore all our readers and viewers however to board the train and not get left behind.
By T.J. Martins for Album Talks.
