A music chart turns a great many different acts of listening into one ordered list. That is its use and its danger. Once a song has a position, the position travels: into a press release, a meeting about where to tour, a fan's argument, a decision about what to record next. On the way it is easily made to mean more than it measured. A rank in one country's store becomes that country's opinion; a song's absence from a list becomes the absence of its listeners; a jump in searches becomes affection. This study reads a set of public records that try to stop those slides before anyone has used a number, and it asks what the records ask a chart to show and what they forbid it to become.
The records come from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family. Dionyas does not publish judgments. Its list of 1,539 inquiries describes itself as editorial question design and gives its count of generated judgments as 0. Each inquiry is a question with a short title, a scope that says what it covers, a list of the material it would need, a boundary that says what it may not claim, and a state. A small group in the list are chart questions: designs for asking about an artist's chart observations, each written for an artist the scope calls "the chosen artist" and for the markets observed. Dionyas does not say who drafted them. What they offer is not a finding about charts or markets but a design for reading a chart, written down and left open.
The research question and the contribution
The research question is this: how do questions about music chart observation design their asking before any judgment, that is, what do they ask a chart number to show, what material do they name as needed, and what do they say the number may not be made to mean?
The study reads fifteen chart questions chosen by one rule, set out in the method section, and makes two contributions. The first concerns the study of commensuration and quantification. That literature, as this study frames it, describes how numbers make different things comparable and asks what is lost or gained in the making, and when people insist that some things cannot be compared. The fifteen questions take a distinct position in the design of their asking. Each pairs a question about a chart number with a sentence of its own that names one conversion the number may not undergo. This study calls that design a refused conversion, and reads it as incommensurability written down record by record, beside the number, before any use of it. The second contribution concerns the debate on public measures and their effects. That debate holds that rankings and audits change the people and institutions they measure. The questions about what to do in response to a chart keep holding back and further inquiry open beside acting, and state that a rank does not decide creative direction. Several questions, moreover, turn on the person reading the chart: they ask whether something is being done, not what the artist has done. The study names these design choices and what they leave unasked, without deciding any of the questions the records leave open.
Commensuration and quantification
One line of work treats the making of numbers as a social process in its own right. Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, in Commensuration as a Social Process (1998), define commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric. They note that it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalisation, yet has been given little consideration as a general social process. They analyse it as a mode of power and discuss the cognitive and political stakes of calling something incommensurable. That last phrase is the hinge of this study. This study reads a chart as commensuration in a pure form: songs, countries and audiences of every kind placed on one scale. The Dionyas boundaries, as the chapter shows, do the opposite work. They name pairs that the scale must not join.
Theodore M. Porter, in Trust in Numbers (1995), investigates the overwhelming appeal of quantification in the modern world through two centuries of changing cultural meanings of objectivity. He asks how to account for the prestige and power of quantitative methods, and declines the usual answer that social and economic investigation borrowed them because they had succeeded in the study of nature. He proposes to look the other way, at the attractions of quantification in business, government and social research. Espeland and Stevens return in A Sociology of Quantification (2008), which notes increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, analyses quantification, the production and communication of numbers, as a general sociological phenomenon, sets out five of its sociological dimensions, and calls for an ethics of numbers. Andrea Mennicken and Wendy Nelson Espeland, in What's New with Numbers? (2019), survey that literature across administration, democratic rule, economics and personal life, caution against unifying accounts of quantification, and stress tracking it across different sites so as to appreciate its essential ambiguity.
A more recent strand asks the same questions of large digital data. danah boyd and Kate Crawford, in Critical Questions for Big Data (2012), note that scholars in many fields are clamouring for the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, and argue that it is necessary to interrogate critically the assumptions and biases of such data, which they describe as resting on an interplay of technology, analysis and mythology. This study reads store charts and search volumes as data of this kind, and several of the fifteen questions ask, in effect, what the bias of a single platform leaves standing.
The debate, as this study puts it, runs between the use of a common metric and the claim that some things cannot be put on one. This study reads Espeland and Stevens as making the second claim a subject of study rather than a complaint. The Dionyas questions are a chance to see where a published set of chart questions draws its lines of incommensurability, and how specifically.
Public measures and their effects
The second debate concerns what measures do once they are public. Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder, in Rankings and Reactivity (2007), use media rankings of law schools to argue that reactivity, the idea that people change their behaviour in reaction to being evaluated, observed or measured, is a useful lens on how public measures effect change. They identify two mechanisms that induce reactivity, self-fulfilling prophecy and commensuration, and hold that such measures change expectations and permeate institutions. Marilyn Strathern, in 'Improving ratings': audit in the British University system (1997), comments on the proliferation of procedures for evaluating performance and holds that audit does more than monitor: it has a life of its own that jeopardises the life it audits.
N. Anand and Richard A. Peterson, in When Market Information Constitutes Fields (2000), bring this home to music. They argue that in competitive fields the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate, and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation, distribution and interpretation of a web of information about the market. Their case is a music chart, and they show that changes in the scope, methodology or political tone with which market information is presented can give a major jolt to participants' understanding of their field. Michèle Lamont, in Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation (2012), reviews North American and European research in the sociology of valuation and evaluation, focusing on subprocesses such as categorisation and legitimation, on the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and on valuation and evaluative practices.
This study reads these works as asking what a public number does to the world it describes, and to the people who act on it. This study reads the Dionyas chart questions as addressed to such people: whoever has a chart in front of them and is about to say what it means or decide what to do. The second debate is used here to see what the questions try to prevent, and what they cannot.
The paper proceeds as follows. The first section of the chapter sets out the data, the selection rule and the method, including what in the records is shared and what is each record's own. The second reads how the questions refuse to let a chart position become favour, nationality, absence or penetration. The third reads how they handle credit and response, and how they keep holding back open. An appendix gives every record read, word for word. The conclusion returns to the two debates.