Today we are going to introduce to you another piece of technology we have developed at Musicmetric. As you may know, parts of our product are driven by semantic analysis; we don’t just tell you how many people are talking about your artists, but also their opinions, the sentiment and common topics surrounding them. How do we do this? Sentiment analysis is a challenging problem that still has not been solved completely. Many so-called sentiment analysis systems use a very naive method to detect sentiment in a context, i.e. using key words or very basic sentence decomposition. However, human language is not that simple, so these approaches fail to capture irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions.

Musicmetric are pleased to announce its selection for the second annual Digital Mission to South by South West interactive (SXSWi), one of the world’s leading conferences for interactive media taking place in Austin, Texas from 11-17th March 2010. Established in 1994, the conference provides an opportunity for the Digital Mission companies to attend hundreds of conference sessions and networking events.

We were picked from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, legal experts, journalist and industry pundits, to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.

Digital Mission is organised by Chinwag and UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), enabling digital companies to expand into overseas markets and attract investment outside the UK.

If anyone is going to SXSW and would like to meet up – just give us a call!

Musicmetric will be attending MIDEM conference in Cannes, France next week. If anyone would like a demo of our products, further information on Enterprise offerings, or would just like to meet up and have a chat about music charts, analytics, partnerships or anything else then get in touch at midem@musicmetric.com

We hope to see you there!

The Musicmetric team.

Here’s an interesting comparison to make: Lady Gaga vs. Susan Boyle – both are top selling artists in the physical charts so you might expect similar results when comparing their popularity online…

But wait one second – comparing MySpace plays between Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga shows wildly different popularities between the two artists on that social network:

Lady Gaga and Susan Boyle plays on MySpace - click to expand

Squint really hard and you’ll see a blue line right near the time axis – this represents plays per hour on MySpace for Susan Boyle. For a sense of scale, look at the highlighted values: 144 plays per hour for Susan Boyle and 50,000 plays per hour for Lady Gaga.

Surely this shows some kind of error considering Susan Boyle’s latest success in the UK and US charts? Let’s drill down into some other sources of data to attempt to identify the reason for this difference:

The chart below shows the number of new followers/friends/fans per hour added or lost by Susan Boyle on social networks:

Musicmetric - Susan Boyle friends per hour Facebook - click to expand

At first glance it looks pretty messy, but if you look carefully you’ll notice that the most dynamic of the trends for is Fan Adds on Facebook (green line). Some days she’s getting 14 new fans per hour, but others she’s losing then at the same rate. This gives a clue as to where fans of Susan Boyle are the most active online…Facebook

Now let’s look at where Susan Boyle fans hang out online compared to Lady Gaga:

Lady Gaga & Susan Boyle fans on Social Networks - click to expand

Clearly most of Susan Boyle’s online fans reside on Facebook. Looking at MySpace – If you compare the number of Susan Boyle fans with the number of Lady Gaga fans, it’s obvious that Lady Gaga has way more fans on than Susan Boyle on this particular social network: 2101 MySpace fans for Susan Boyle vs. 911,993 MySpace fans for Lady Gaga. This helps explain the considerable difference between the MySpace play counts for the two artists, and indeed – the ratios of number of fans on MySpace for the two artists and number of plays for them are relatively close:

Susan Boyle MySpace fans = 2012
Lady Gaga MySpace fans = 911,993
RATIO = 450:1

Susan Boyle MySpace plays per hour = 144
Lady Gaga MySpace plays per hour = 50,014
RATIO = 350: 1

Now let’s take a look why Susan Boyle has so few fans on MySpace compared to Lady Gaga by taking a peek at the fan age profile for both artists:

Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga fan ages - click to expand

That above chart clearly shows that the fan age spread for Susan Boyle is considerably wider than that for Lady Gaga (the numbers represent percentage of fans of any given age). This goes some way towards explaining the fact that Susan Boyle has less ‘fans’ on MySpace than would be expected – her fan age demographic is much older than the normal MySpace user demographic and falls more into the demographic for Facebook or older – explaining the larger number of Facebook fans.

Now taking into account the high number of physical sales Susan Boyle has made, one could make the conclusion that since the age demographic for her fans is considerably higher than that of the average social network or streaming music user demographic – it would be fair to assume that most of Susan Boyles fans do not use the social music web to listen to her music, they would rather buy her CD. This is backed up by her low play count on MySpace.

So there we go – these examples demonstrate a good reason why taking stats at face value, without looking at the full picture can give incorrect insight into music trends.

We are very pleased to announce that Jeremy Silver has joined Musicmetric as non-exec Chairman of our Board of Directors. His extensive music industry and technology experience will assist in steering the company during our expansion in 2010, and help ignite our drive to the international market.

Previously Jeremy was worldwide Vice President of New Media for EMI Music in London and Los Angeles. He then took the position of CEO at Sibelius Software which he led for five years, leading to an acquisition by Avid Technology. Some of Jeremy’s other music industry experience includes working as Director of Media Affairs at Virgin Records, running the ground breaking playlist-sharing music service Uplister Inc. and launching early music website The Raft.

He serves as Deputy Chairman of Futurelab, an education technology think-tank chaired by Lord David Puttnam, and regularly presents at music industry conferences around the world.

He is currently CEO of the newly created Featured Artist Coalition, a new music industry organisation co-chaired by Nick Mason of Pink Floyd and David Rowntree of Blur. Members include: Radiohead, Annie Lennox, Tom Jones, Robbie Williams, Kate Nash and many others.