TechCrunch EU & TechCrunch USA have written a great article supporting our beta musicmetric Essentials launch today, you can read it here: http://bit.ly/234mF0 .

We’re giving away 250 voucher codes for TechCrunch readers to register for a 1 month free trial of Essentials, with some sneak previews of Professional added in, so get registering !

An update from the development team…

Our aim at musicmetric is quite simple: We will collect and analyse all the data on the web (and some that isn’t) related to trends in music and present it to our users in an easily accessible and actionable format. Over the next few months we will have downloaded and analysed a large proportion of all relevant published articles, and will continue to do so as they are written to keep right up to date with opinions, trends and buzz.

Our aims are simple, but the challenges we’ve faced over the last year and a half approaching our launch have been far from trivial, and hopefully this post will give some insight into the technical side of what we’re doing.

Gathering the data, although the easy part, needs an extensive hardware infrastructure to download, extract and archive text from millions of pages a month. Accurately analysing, scaling and detecting patterns in the data locked up in these terabytes of text is the real challenge and most interesting part of working on musicmetric. It would be naive to simply present raw data as trends in the global music landscape (although we do supply raw data), the trend tracking methods we have developed would be useless if not scaled by accurate influence ranking for the sources of these trends, and simply calculating these scores is a huge task in itself.

Likewise, following activity on just one or two social media websites and presenting this as trends would give a massively biased view of where an artist is actually popular. For example, the social media website Orkut is hugely popular in Brazil, so all data originating from this website would be biased towards that country. Likewise with Twitter, trends would lean towards the UK / USA and not necessarily reflect a global view. We are rolling out tracking for multiple social networks over the next month.

Another challenge faced are the methods we have developed for text mining and sentiment analysis (and not just the fact that we need to analyse over a million documents per day). An example would be the band Pavement. How does a machine know if a piece of text is referring to the band, or a pavement alongside a road. What about two artists with the same name? There are three artists that go by the name Nirvana, seven are called Justice. Which one does our customer care about? Perhaps all of them? Disambiguation is key for these applications to work correctly. The methods we use for sentiment analysis also have to cope with changing vocabulary, or even different languages so adaptive methods are key, for this reason we employ a machine learning approach to this problem, which again has taken a long time in development.

Because we know our customers are using this data to make important decisions in how they run their business or manage their artists, we are making absolutely sure that the data is reliable, trustworthy and complete. Traceability of data sources is paramount to reliability. Our infrastructure allows full audit of any piece of data at any time, from how it was scaled or normalised, right back to which one of our servers originally collected the raw version. This is important for a variety of reasons, particularly the ability to show exactly why trends are occurring, and improves trust in our analytics. It is one thing displaying a line chart or an index showing success for an artist, it is quite another presenting a full breakdown of each source of data and how it was included in the analysis, giving clear perspective on how that line chart or index was calculated.

musicmetric is a well funded team of 6 fulltime staff (and growing) with extensive backgrounds and deep knowledge in the field, we are using cutting edge technology and work closely with our partners to solve difficult problems and have spent the last year and a half working these out. We are extremely excited to be coming towards the end of our development / alpha stage and into our official beta, then preparing for our full launch in November.

Lady Gaga’s recent involvement in the Gay Rights march on Washington DC resulted in this huge increase in views and plays per hour.

It’s not just superstar artists like Lady Gaga who we track – why not check out a demo of musicmetric Essentials and see the stats for the 500,000+ artists we’re currently tracking !

The file sharing debate has got serious. Now a cause for government debate, all factions of the music industry have been speaking up to make their positions known.

The debate has its roots in the publication of the Digital Britain report back in June written by Lord Carter. If you missed the details of that report take a look here http://bit.ly/E4x. Originally the report advised to give regulators until 2010 to consider what technical measures ISPs should take — if any. But that has now been deemed too long a time frame and the government is pushing for action.

Thus government has since been looking at ways to deal with the growth and protection of online content for the film, music and games industries. Innovation and Skill Minister Peter Mandelson proposed a “three strikes and you’re out” system for curbing the file sharing problem. This has wildly divided opinions within the online creative community.

UK Music CEO Feargal Sharkey was keen to stress their total cooperation with the government in an open letter to Mandelson. Appearing a week later on a fringe panel at the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Sharkey expanded on his views for tackling the problem. He says “the ultimate goal has to be to create an environment where the content industries, working with the ISPs and the technology companies, can build what will be sustainable businesses in the online world”. You can hear the whole audioboo here http://bit.ly/W46KC.

Blogging for the Guardian, Robert Andrews argues that this may not exactly add up to support for Mandelson’s proposal, you can catch his post here http://bit.ly/Xnqyr Initially, other organisations did not warm to the proposal at all. The Featured Artists Coalition was initially disapproving of the proposal. The FAC felt that the life would be squeezed out of music discovery culture if fans sharing music illegally was to be penalised. Their unwillingness to take firm action against the most egregious offenders sparked rage from the prominent artist Lily Allen.

Allen’s blog argued that artists were running out of reasons to continue making records if they were doomed from the start not to make any legal sales. This placed her at odds with the likes of Radiohead, but was called a “bold move” and supported by UK Music. Her position ignited fierce debate within the music community. However, after support grew from more artists for Allen’s comments, the FAC released a statement that backed Lily’s move for a clear government policy on clamping down on illegal file sharing.

A recent debate on how artists want to move things forward, which Lily Allen attended, was chaired by Jeremy Silver last week. Check his blog here http://jeremy1.wordpress.com/. By all counts the debate was almost entirely split until the close. The conclusion reached was that file sharers ought to have their bandwidth squeezed, but not removed altogether. Mandelson’s “three strikes” position was out, but forcing offenders to accept slower web connections– and thus less media content – might well have the desired effect, which is a bit like only being able to get black and white TV in mono if you watch without a TV license. For many consumers, it’s hassle that isn’t worth the money it saves you.

The libertarians in this debate tend to be breaking acts that think file sharing is a necessity to open their music up to create awareness and a fan base in the early days. The conservative faction are artists more likely to hold major record deals whereby they have been allocated large sums for album production and are now desperate to shift units to work their way into profit.

The issue appears to be most damaging to those artists that are newly popular and whose future record deals are blighted by file sharing. But there is a third way which is stealthily growing in popularity and might make the whole bandwidth-squeezing debate redundant if it takes off… companies like Spotify are able to make fair and elastic deals with the record labels and ISP’s, as they have done in Sweden where Spotify comes as standard with your internet connection. Surely it is a win-win to promote such applications, giving revenue to artists – albeit less than retail revenue and delivering unlimited quantities of music on demand to fans, which reduces the need to file trade in the first place. As the UK wireless cloud and mobile apps make on-demand media more affordable and mobile, file trading will probably become a niche activity for people who collect MP3 files rather than a mainstream way to consume media.

Is this the best way forward? In an email by Brian Message and Jon Webster of the Music Managers Forum to its members last week, a call for ISP’s and the music Industry working together was well received… watch this space. http://bit.ly/HNS5w.