Zahra Gor­don

The song Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy by Ian "Bun­ji Gar­lin" Al­varez is not the sec­ond most down­loaded song on iTunes in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, as many were led to be­lieve on Tues­day by posts on so­cial me­dia Web sites and main­stream me­dia. A pho­to of the iTunes Top Sin­gles chart show­ing Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy as the num­ber two most pop­u­lar down­load ap­peared on Twit­ter.

The chart al­so in­clud­ed Ri­han­na's Di­a­monds and Ma­roon 5's One More Night, lead­ing many to be­lieve these were in­ter­na­tion­al sta­tis­tics. Bun­ji's pub­li­cists were among those who mis­un­der­stood the fig­ures and put out a re­lease on Mon­day claim­ing his tune was No 2 in the world.

Con­sumers use iTunes, an elec­tron­ic mu­sic ser­vice cre­at­ed by Ap­ple, to down­load mu­sic, movies and e-books. It us­es ge­olo­ca­tion soft­ware that reads In­ter­net Pro­to­col (IP) ad­dress­es on com­put­ers and a Glob­al Po­si­tion­ing Sys­tem (GPS) on smart­phones to pro­vide da­ta on where users are. The chart ac­cessed by users in T&T is com­piled in this way from sta­tis­tics on lo­cal down­loads, not the en­tire world.

Words of con­grat­u­la­tions for be­ing "num­ber two in the world" poured in for Al­varez on Tues­day, how­ev­er. In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian Al­varez said he was cor­rect­ing peo­ple on Twit­ter. In one such tweet, re­spond­ing to a lo­cal me­dia house, Al­varez said: "We fig­ured it out. iTunes sees your IP ad­dress and gives you the tops in your coun­try and re­gion. That way vis­i­tors know the songs."

T&T Guardian tech­nol­o­gy colum­nist Mark Lyn­der­say when con­tact­ed said that con­fu­sion with the top sin­gles chart was com­mon be­cause of the way Ap­ple had his­tor­i­cal­ly been forced to do busi­ness. He added: "Ap­ple has on­line stores for every coun­try it does busi­ness with and the con­tent of each store is slight­ly dif­fer­ent de­pend­ing on what pub­lish­ers al­low.

"But while each store ben­e­fits from the tech­nol­o­gy of all the oth­er stores, it's ef­fec­tive­ly a stand-alone en­ti­ty to the cus­tomer who logs in­to a sin­gle zoned store." Since word spread of Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy's suc­cess, iTune users will now see that the song has moved to num­ber one on the chart.

On an­oth­er elec­tron­ic mu­sic Web site, Trinidad­Tunes.com, Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy is num­ber eight on the week's top songs chart. Mean­while, on the video-shar­ing Web site YouTube.com, Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy has gar­nered more than 113,000 plays. Jar­rod Sarai, ex­ec­u­tive pro­duc­er of Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy, said sta­tis­tics for the num­ber of times Dif­fer­en­tol­ogy has been down­loaded on iTunes will not be avail­able un­til March.

"They do a pay­out every quar­ter, so we wouldn't know. We won't see all that da­ta un­til about March, since the song on­ly went up like last week," he said. Al­varez said al­though the num­ber of down­loads was en­cour­ag­ing, the "emo­tion­al re­spons­es trumped all mon­e­tary gain." He al­so said lo­cal­ly there was a mis­un­der­stand­ing of what at­tain­ing in­ter­na­tion­al suc­cess re­al­ly meant.

He added: "What is con­sid­ered in­ter­na­tion­al? A lot of us have the con­cept that when you see the mu­sic on MTV and BET, then it is in­ter­na­tion­al. But what we do is in­ter­na­tion­al any­way. "We get muf­fled in­to this smoke be­cause we not see­ing it on cer­tain me­dia streams. "We just came back from Ger­many Car­ni­val and the streets were rammed out and so­ca was the or­der of the day."