USA Today reports that "Touch My Body" debuts at #22 on this week's airplay chart, based on Nielsen BDS numbers. These are the same figures that are used for by Billboard, therefore the song's position on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart should be around #22 as well. Official Billboard chart positions will be published later this week. Ken Barnes of USA Today, analyzes the chart:
"It would be foolish to ignore the initial impact of Mariah Carey's Touch My Body,' which hits the chart at No. 22 in one of the highest debuts yet recorded.
Nobody comes close to Mariah's No. 22 debut, of course, but another superstar, Usher, scores an unusually high entry at 51 with 'Love in This Club'."
As promised earlier, here is a detailed explanation about the way Billboard charts are calculated:
Last year Radio & Records was merged into Nielsen BDS, which Billboard uses. So, there is no longer a distinction between R&R and Billboard in terms of the radio panels used. R&R/BDS are a radio measuring system whereby each time a song is played, the number of people listening to the station at that time is documented. The number of listeners for each time a song is played is then added together to get "impressions" (i.e. how many people have heard a song in a week). Keep in mind it doesn't measure how many separate people have heard a song since many people hear a song more than once during a week. This information is calculated on a weekly basis and correlates to the airplay charts Billboard uses to determine the Hot 100 and other charts. The Hot 100 Airplay chart uses a Wednesday-Tuesday airplay week, while R&R uses a Monday-Sunday week. Billboard uses a Monday-Sunday week for the Hot Digital Songs chart.
The airplay figures we post from Mediabase are not the same as the BDS figures and thus, the number of impressions reported from Mediabase and the chart positions determined by it may be different from the actual numbers and positions on the Billboard charts. However, the Mediabase figures make for a good estimate on a song's airplay performance in a given week.
Questions often arise about how the Hot 100 is tabulated. Here is the formula:
Sales are divided by 10
(so 100,000 downloads sold = 10,000 chart points)
Impressions are divided by 10,000
(so 100 million impressions = 10,000 chart points)
Streamings are divided by 500
(so 50,000 streams = 100 chart points)
In common terms, 100,000 downloads is equal to 100 million impressions
OH MY LORD! Lambs....as soon as this record is available to download from itunes this has to be Mariah's 18th number one hit making her that much closer to 20#1 hits that the Beatles have!
