If you’re heading to Midem this year and want to find out more about our exciting product launch, and chat about peer to peer tracking, social media tracking, web mention tracking and music analytics in general then pop by our stand MEDIUM 12 for a demo.

We will also be presenting real world case studies of Musicmetric Pro demonstrating how it can be useful to you and all levels of the industry. We will also present where and how companies have implemented our API to great effect so don’t miss our presentation on Visionary Monday at 4.00pm in the Innovation Factory.

At our stand we will be having an informal drop in “beers and demo” session on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th from 4pm till 6pm.

We will also have a presence at the Midem hack day so head to the presentations or register to meet the hackers if you want to discuss our API and data feeds.

Or catch us at the Music Tech Meetup @midem for networking and drinks on Sunday evening from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. More info here.

Attending from Musicmetric are:

• Gregory Mead – CEO
• Marie-Alicia Chang – Head of Business development
• Jeremy Silver – Chairman
• Jameel Syed – CTO
• Juliana Obeng – Communications executive
• Ben Fields – API / Data lead (Midem Hacker)

You can find us during the conference at stand MEDIUM 12 but if you want to organise a meeting then drop us an email on midem2012@musicmetric.com.

See you in Cannes!

Attending Midem this year? Come along for networking, drinks and to meet the teams from some of the leading companies in music technology.

Register here!

Traditionally ‘ones to watch’ lists have been put together through a combination of tastemakers tips and a level of label marketing. This year, MTV UK & Ireland has taken a different tack, enlisting our help to take fans online response to an artist into account. The search for an unsigned artist ended with Context (formerly Context MC) crowned the winner of the unsigned slot on the MTV Brand New for 2012 list.

With more and more fans discovering and interacting with bands online, looking at online buzz as a major part of Brand New for 2012 is a fresh and forward looking take. The metrics we chart add a completely new and dimension, arguably giving more realistic insight as to how the artist will fare in the real world – beyond the list and label marketing.

Artists like Lana Del Rey [click for stats] making such a big impact through social media channels (such as YouTube) in the last year only serves to highlight how important these metrics are now for all artists. For MTV to allow an unsigned artist onto their Brand New list (alongside Del Rey) based on online buzz is a great step.

During the course of the unsigned competition The 500 long-list artists together generated the following across social media –

New Fans: 107,181
New Plays: 3,552,848

From the start of the competition and throughout, each artist was tracked by us providing daily statistics on which artists have risen the most in terms of their buzz; an aggregate of votes, plays, new fans and comments.

So congratulations to Context! you can check him out on twitter here

Ever wondered where Beyonce’s album “4″ has been downloaded on BitTorrent in the last month? Well wonder no more, we’ve made a nice map that shows it. As you can see she’s pretty popular.

N.B. The scale refers to the number of open download sessions monitored rather than the total number of downloads.

Just wanted to let everyone know about a couple of research conferences we’ll be involved with and attending that are coming up quite soon. The first, the Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD) is this Sunday, October 23rd at the Palomar House Hilton in downtown Chicago, co-located with the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys).

I’m co-chairing this workshop (along with the other co-chairs — Amélie Anglade (Soundcloud), Òscar Celma (Gracenote), Paul Lamere (The Echo Nest), and Brian McFee (Computer Audition Lab, University of California San Diego)) which will cover a diverse array of approaches and angles for music recommendation and discovery.

The workshop is part of RecSys 2011, which runs the full week, though I sadly can’t stay for most of the conference aside from our workshop (see below). It should prove to be an interesting day of research. Are you planning on attending? Let us know.

Good news for our more statistically inclined API users and anyone else who wants to run advanced statistical analysis on Musicmetric data.

Andrew Morgan (@minkymorgan) has built some helper functions in R for the Musicmetric API. These allow quick and easy access to our time series data for any artist given their ID (or any third party ID including Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook), and for top artists based on our chart api endpoints.

The code uses the Quantmod library, which has a whole bunch of time series analysis and charting features.

As we’re heading towards the end of another productive day here at Musicmetric, we were wondering what people on the web might be starting to listen to right now. You know, to make sure we’re in with the cool crowd before going to Da Club later.

So we hacked together a little chart using our real time play monitoring that ranks the artists by the change in their play counts online over the last hour. This ranks higher the artists that people have started to listen to over the last hour.

Here’s the result for 16:00 to 17:00 GMT today:

1 Maroon 5 – Moves Like Jagger [feat. Christina Aguilera]
2 Britney Spears – I Wanna Go
3 Chris Brown – Beautiful People
4 LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
5 OneRepublic – Good Life
6 Cobra Starship – You Make Me Feel…
7 Jason Aldean – Dirt Road Anthem
8 Lady Antebellum – Just A Kiss
9 AFI – Beautiful Thieves
10 Gym Class Heroes – Stereo Hearts Feat. Adam Levine
11 Demi Lovato – Skyscraper
12 Jay-Z – Otis
13 Colette Carr – We Do It (Primo)
14 Dierks Bentley – Am I The Only One
15 Miguel – Sure Thing (Main Version)
16 Brad Paisley – Remind Me (Duet With Carrie Underwood)
17 Lady Gaga – You And I
18 Jake Owen – Barefoot Blue Jean Night
19 Coldplay – Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall
20 Avril Lavigne – Smile

And good news everyone – we’ve even made it into a Spotify playlist for your delectation right here! Sure it’s a bit mainstream, but what do you expect – this is the internet. When we’ve got some time to spare we’ll throw in some personalisation.

Since Michael Eavis’s surprising comment to The Times about Glastonbury Festival being “on the way out” due to festival apathy and the economic downturn, there has been much discussion about the state of the UK’s festival scene.

Today we’re going to look at how releasing an album impacts the fan activity on social networks, focusing on Facebook Likes. It’s clear that for some artists the impact is huge, check out the graph below that shows number of likes per day for Lady Gaga during the month she released the new album Born This Way:

One of the aspects of Musicmetric’s data analysis involves tracking the activity of artists and their fans across the major social networking channels on which they are active, including Facebook, Twitter MySpace and YouTube. One of my tasks as a data researcher is to check that the Musicmetric database is up to date with new bands and new releases.

This is made easier by the fact that these days, in order to raise their profile, engage with their fans and promote their music releases, the majority of up and coming bands have a presence on all the major social networks. And it is often through these networks that I can find out more about a band, and establish how popular they are becoming.