Once again those good people at the Guardian have utilised the Musicmetric API, this time to create a Band Tracker showing the day on day change in activity across the social networks of acts playing at last weekend’s Hop Farm Festival in Kent.

Hop Farm promotes itself as an independently run festival that is sponsorship and branding free. You may recall that Neil Young [click the link to see the Fantracker stats page] headlined its inaugural event in 2008, but in 2009 it failed to capitalise on this success with a middle of the road indie-rock line-up. Last year Bob Dylan made his only UK performance of 2010 at the festival, and the supporting bill benefited from a consistent folk-bias including breakthrough artists of that year Seasick Steve and Mumford & Sons.

This year’s bill of headliners was certainly something of a coup for festival promoter Vince Power, who secured three legendary acts: The Eagles, Prince and Morrissey. Other rock legends appearing over the weekend included Bryan Ferry, Iggy & The Stooges, Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

The most contemporary of the sub-headlining acts this year was 22-year-old double-Brit award winner, Tinie Tempah, and it was he who kept the veterans of rock and pop off the top the Hop Farm Band Tracker chart over the festival weekend. Following the success of the biggest show of his career on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, and his appearance at the Wireless Festival in London’s Hyde Park, at Hop Farm Tinie was main support to Prince who was playing his first show in the UK since his record-breaking 21-nights at London’s O2 Arena in 2007.

Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax [click on the links to see their Fantracker stats pages], known collectively to fans of thrash metal as ‘The Big Four’, performed together for the first time at the Sonisphere Festival in Warsaw in Poland in June 2010. This Friday 8th July at Sonisphere in Knebworth, Hertfordshire, they share a bill for the first time on a British stage.

Earlier this week, brothers David and Stephan Dewaele, one half of alternative rock/electronic band Soulwax, and world-renowned DJs behind 2ManyDJs and The Flying Dewaele Brothers, unveiled Radio Soulwax.

Two and a half years in development, Radio Soulwax is a radio station but not in the conventional sense. Every week, over the next few months, the brothers will be adding a new one hour show to the Radio Soulwax website, and this will culminate in a collection of twenty-four music mixes. These will all remain online in a rotated and continuous loop, and are also available to stream and download via a fully interactive iPhone/iPad/Android application.

Festival season is upon us one more and with Glastonbury kicking it all off this past weekend – take a look here at our latest blog post on the success of breaking bands at Glasto – it’s off to a cracking start.

Loud music and frolicking in a large field are all very well, but how does playing a festival affect a band or artists’ wider popularity with the masses? Does it generate a wider awareness of their brand, does it gain them any more fans? Does it have any effect at all many a mud soaked artist may ponder. One obvious hypothesis is that the boost might be bigger for a lesser-known band as opposed to an act who already boasts a large following. However, luckily for you there’s no need to speculate when the numbers are so readily available from us and our dinky little app.

Below we’ve profiled a few of our top festival picks of the summer. Taking a moment to discuss some choice acts and their Musicmetric stats we’re also having a look at how playing a festival might impact on signs of the all important online success or otherwise, which gets right to the heart of how the Musicmetric app delivers valuable insight into the relationship of the online and offline world.

Anyone who has been keeping an eye on the Glastonbury 2011 Band Tracker, which the Guardian put together using the Musicmetric API, will have noticed that rather like the top of the Football Premiership, the top 5 has been rendered virtually impenetrable by the big names. Led by Beyoncé, who ‘shall not be moved’ from the number 1 spot, the top 5 also includes Ke$ha, Coldplay, Jessie J and U2.

The Barcelona Music Hack Day, running in conjunction with Sonar festival this year was brilliantly organised, and we were lucky enough to send two Musicmetric-ers to promote our API, build some hacks and generally participate in the music-tech-geek fun.

Ben (@alsothings) presented the new additions to the Musicmetric API, and the slideshow can be viewed right here on slide share:

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) claimed the digital album ‘came of age’ last year. According to its statistics, 21m digital albums were sold in 2010, representing 17.5% of all album sales and a growth of 30.6% on 2009’s figures. However, this failed to halt the decline of combined sales of digital and physical albums, which they say fell by 7%. This decline is largely the result of increasing numbers of illegal downloads, which reached record levels and amounted to three-quarters of all downloads last year, according to a study carried out on behalf of the BPI.

One way to discourage music piracy is to use creative marketing strategies to heighten the experience and the enjoyment of acquiring music legally. The Kaiser Chiefs, whose new album The Future Is Medieval was released digitally earlier this month, have done just that.

We’ve had a very busy few months here at Musicmetric, and because it has been a bit quiet on the update front we have decided to give you an idea of what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. As a sneak preview of what’s to come in the near future we opened up some of our Movie torrent data to coincide with the Movie Hack Day in Berlin last weekend. Movies I hear you cry?? That’s awesome, but how is it relevant to Musicmetric?!

Well it just so happens that when we set up the company we called it Semetric Ltd and our plan is to be rapidly expanding into all areas of digital entertainment, including movies. Our technology has been developed from day one with the ability to track not just trends in the music space, but any space where activity occurs online. Our sentiment analysis algorithms work just as well for movie reviews as they do for music reviews and our torrent tracking system doesn’t care if it’s monitoring file sharing for a music album or a movie, it’s all just data.

Our semantic meta-database lies at the core of this, knowing about relations between the different domain areas we track and their own specific properties and allowing data to be requested from our API in a number of ways using a whole array of third party ID’s.

If you’re interested in learning more about our plans, or want to get involved then contact us and we’ll have a chat or sign up for an API key right now. In the mean time head over to the Movie API documentation to get a flavour of what’s to come…

After a long weekend of API hacking, staying up too late and travelling we’ve finally recovered from the Berlin Music Hack Day. This year it was hosted at the MTV Networks Berlin HQ, and was the perfect setting for us to launch the Musicmetric Developer API.

We attended in force (unfortunately Ben could not attend again due to VISA problems again – he does actually work for us, we promise…) to present our new API and give prizes for the best hacks built using it.

The event was very well organised by the SoundCloud guys (Johan & Roel), with a great presence from music tech companies including 7Digital, Spotify, Echonest, Seevl, Songkick and more. The MTV offices was an awesome venue to host the event, with great facilities and a free canteen courtesy of the sponsors!

Response to our API was great, especially since we only launched it on the day with little to no notice for hackers coming with ideas for their projects already in mind. We gave two prizes for hacks using our API, awarded to the following teams, who received a pair of lovely headphones and limited edition awesome-green Musicmetric T-Shirts:

Tractor
By Niko Felger, Phil Cowans
The Songkick guys built a chrome browser plugin using the Musicmetric, Songkick, Last.fm and Soundcloud API’s that does entity detection on a page to identify what bands are being mentioned, then shows a bunch of stats and info about the artist in a dropdown.

Senti(Com)ment
By Nikola Chochkov
Nikola from Soundcloud thought of a great use of the Sentiment analysis API: To calculate the average sentiment for comments made by users on Soundcloud tracks. This project has loads of scope for expansion into other areas of Soundcloud, including forum discussions.

We even managed to find time to build a hack of our own:

RealTimeSentiTweetGagasm
This pulls in Lady Gaga mentions using the Twitter streaming API and feeds it through our Sentiment Analysis service, and uses the Last.fm API to grab the number of ‘likes’, scrobbles and ‘bans’ for the artist, allowing the the number of positive and negative tweets to be compared in realtime to the number of likes and bans on Last.fm. We’ll be putting the source code on Github shortly.

We’ll be sponsoring the Barcelona Music Hack Day on June 16th – 17th so see you there!

We are pleased to announce our freshly rolled-out API v1 service. We have been busy putting lots of our data into a nice API and are very excited to see what can be made with it. You may have already seen an incomplete sneak preview at the SF Musichackday, but this version is much more complete.

Full details of our available services can be found at http://developer.musicmetric.com

Principally, we have three distinct sections to our API:

Sentiment analyzer

Our sentiment analyzer determines the tone of some text. This can be used to determine if, for example, a music review is favourable or not. It returns a score from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). It has been trained on music related text so works best with music reviews etc.

Artist trend data

Our API exposes artist timeseries data for a selection of social networks and the web in general. We provide daily changes in fans/followers, comments, daily play counts, web mention tracking as well as an overview summarizing an artist’s metrics and how they’ve done in the last 24 hours.

Artist fan demographic and geo-location

Provides details about the composition and location of fans of an artist. This includes the distribution of the age of fans as well as city and country level geo-location distributions.

We are very excited to see what applications are built using our data and services!