5:19 p.m. | Updated Like any major awards show, the Grammys inspire no shortage of clairvoyants who claim to know how the Recording Academy’s fickle (yet conservative) voters think. They are often wrong, of course. One example: Two years ago virtually every expert was sure that Eminem would sweep the major categories; he won none of them.

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The social media age has brought lots of new indicators of potential Grammy success, and this year Shazam, Spotify and Mashable, among others, made guesses based on user data and online chatter. But did these fare better than the human experts this year?

Not much, perhaps because, as Grammy watchers frequently point out, the industry insiders who vote on the prizes are not always aligned with popular — or critical — tastes.

In the four major award categories — album, record and song of the year, and best new artist — the most successful crowd-sourced prediction was by Shazam, the song-identifying app, which looked to how many times songs were “tagged” on the service. Its choices were correct three times: Fun., for song (“We Are Young”) and best new artist, and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” for record of the year. (Record of the year is for a single’s performers and producers; song of the year is for songwriters.)

But Shazam was off the mark with album of the year. It favored Fun.’s “Some Nights” by a huge lead, but the prize went to Mumford Sons’ “Babel”   — a distant fourth on Shazam’s list. (In other categories, like rock song, rap song, and gospel, Shazam was also on target.)

Spotify looked to the number of streams on its service for clues, and also had mixed success. It was right about Gotye for record of the year (and also for best pop duo or group performance), as well as Mumford Sons for best album. But it was wrong in guessing the Lumineers for best new artist. (Spotify made no prediction for song of the year.)

Mashable looked at data about social networks data from Activ8Social, a marketing agency, and guessed right on half the major spots. Like Spotify, it was right about album and record of the year. For best new artist, however, the social Web gave Mashable mixed signals. Frank Ocean was the clear favorite on Twitter, but Facebook gave an edge to Fun., which took the prize. For song of the year, YouTube indicated a wide lead for Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” but Fun. took that one as well.

How did these compare to the expert handicaps? About even. Billboard was two for four in the major categories: correct on album and song of the year, but incorrect on record and best new artist. Grammy wins, it would seem, are beyond even the wisdom of crowds.

Pricing Change at eMusic: One of the oldest digital music services, eMusic has survived more than a decade as a subscription download service, offering songs at lower prices than its competitors, but only to customers who pay a monthly fee. The service announced on Monday that it is dropping the subscription requirement, and selling songs to anyone who will pay for them.

“Although our focus on this audience hasn’t changed, our new business model is more inclusive and invites everyone to engage with what eMusic offers,” Adam Klein, eMusic’s chief executive, said in a statement.

EMusic, which opened in 1998 and started its subscription service in 2000, has struggled to remain competitive in the current market. It was once one of the few services to sell downloads without copying restrictions, but those have been largely dropped by other retailers. And in addition to longtime competition from iTunes, eMusic has also faced new download stores from Amazon and Google as well as a new generation of popular streaming services like Spotify.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/digital-notes-the-scorecard-on-social-medias-grammy-predictions/?partner=rss&emc=rss