According to a new new NYU research report – Does Chatter Matter? – user-generated content, including blogs and social networking sites, should be considered an important tool for promoting music and predicting sales.

Researchers looked at the usefulness of user-generated content in predicting sales in the music industry. They tracked the changes in online chatter for a sample of 108 albums for four weeks before and after their release dates.

They found:

• the volume of blog posts about an album is positively correlated with future sales
• greater increases in an artist‚Äôs Myspace friends week over week have a weaker correlation to higher future sales
• traditional factors are still relevant ‚Äì albums released by major labels and albums with a number of reviews from mainstream sources like Rolling Stone also tended to have higher future sales

“The results of this study suggest that user-generated content should be considered seriously by record labels,” note the report authors.

This echoes something we’ve said for several years: the music industry should take audio podcasts and other user-generated content seriously. The people creating podcasts other Internet media are some of music’s biggest fans and are influencers, too.

In other words, a little love for podcasters could go a long way.