Note: this is a very basic tutorial. UR students/faculty/staff can get additional help from Dr. Fairtile
1. Enter an Artist or Band in “Keyword Search”
2. Your results will display beneath the instructions; you may need to scroll down to see them. You may get a list of similar artists, or maybe several versions of your artist, followed by the names of countries in parentheses. Whatever box(es) you check, you will receive chart data from those countries.
OR
You can click the “Albums” tab and select the album(s) that you want to chart, or click the “Singles” tab and select one or more singles.
3. On the next screen you will see a graph indicating chart positions over time. But first, scroll down and look at the column on the left, which is labeled “Current Search.” Under Format, you can choose between albums and singles (highlighted in orange), and under Country you can select the individual country whose data you want.
Next to the “Current Search” column is a table of the albums or songs that are being charted (they call this the “Source”). Important fields in the Source table include
The color of each line of data in the Source table corresponds to the graph above (purple in the table = purple line in the graph). Only those albums whose boxes are checked will appear in the graph. If you uncheck a line in the Source table, its data disappears from the graph (you can put it back by checking the box again)
4. The graph… here it’s easy to get confused. For the default setting (“sale ranking”), the X-axis is the date and the Y-axis is the chart position, so you can see how an album charted over a given time period. If you hover over a dot on the graph, you can see contextual information about that date (unless none is provided, which sometimes happens).
5. Another setting for the graph is “Absolute,” which stacks up the chart data for all checked albums, regardless of the date that they appeared – the X-axis of this graph is still related to time, but there are no specific dates. This is useful to examine the relative charting of a group of albums.
6. If you click “Export graph” you can get a .png file to download
7. If you want to compare albums or singles by multiple artists, click the + next to the title to add that line of data to your clipboard. Then do another search and click the + to add that data to your clipboard.