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.

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.

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.

Looking at some unexpected artists who have been powering their way up the charts, we noticed that there were some truly interesting things happening with their online data.

LMFAO

First up is American electro hop duo, LMFAO, who have soared to fame after their song ‘Party Rock Anthem’ stormed the charts, gaining them a number 2 position. ‘Party Rock Anthem’ is the first single to be taken from their sophomore album, Sorry For Party Rocking, so we’re going to try and predict whether LMFAO are going to be a flash in the pan, or the new Lady Gaga.

Last year the BBC placed pop newcomers Ellie Goulding and Marina and the Diamonds at the top of their Sound of 2010 poll. Both offered a take on British female electro pop and, having taking first and second position on the poll, each looked set for chart domination. A year on we can now look back on the data to see how their dreams of pop stardom have panned out.

Now that Lady Gaga has hit over 1 Billion video views on YouTube alone, we thought we’d have a look at how her social network presence has grown this year so far.

According to the World Map of Happiness Denmark is officially “the happiest place in the world”. Perhaps that’s why it’s second biggest export after bacon is infectiously happy pop music….

The latests of these exports is The Asteroids Galaxy Tour.

Following in the footsteps of other Danish artists such as Aqua and Alphabeat; The Asteroids, (for short) have taken their brand of Danish Pop global. Check the geographical spread of bit torrent downloads for their album Fruit (2009).

From Denmark to the World - Click to Expand

As you can see from the below bar graph they have a strong following in America, again this is based on bit torrent downloads of their album Fruit (2009) . With their home country only appearing 7th on the list it appears they have a home from home in America, no wonder they’re doing three dates at SXSW…

Home from Home - Click to Expand

They not only appeal to a wide number of nationalities but also a wide number of ages. Their strongest following maybe in the under 20′s but they have quite a wide age spread. Here’s their age spread alongside Katy Perry who they recently supported on a tour of Europe.

You can see that Katy Perry has quite a narrow peak focused around the mid 20′s age range, but interestingly The Asteroids Galaxy Tour have a much wider age spread focused around the under 20′s.

Under 18's to Over 30's - Click to Expand

And their gender split isn’t bad either…

Not just for women - Click to Expand

Perhaps this universal appeal is why their biggest online following is not found on MySpace or Facebook but on LastFM. Clearly The Asteroids infectiously catchy pop music is a big hit with the LastFM listeners.

LastFM is first choice - Click to Expand

You can catch Denmark’s hottest, newest, most appealing export at SXSW on these dates and who knows you may be lucky enough to bump into one of the Musicmetric Crew!

17 Mar – Austin, TX: Emo’s Annex

18 Mar – Austin, TX: Vice

19 Mar – Austin, TX: Beso Cantina

This is the first of a series of posts featuring music analytics for artists who are playing at South By South West.

Band of Skulls

This Southampton formed three-piece have been making a lot of noise across the pond. Check out this chart that shows the the top locations for the bands followers on MySpace.

Austin comes in at 7th place for social network fan locations, so South by South West should be a good gig.

Band of Skulls: From Southampton to L.A. - Click to Enlarge

The next chart is a good visualisation of where people have been downloading the latest Band of Skulls Album – Baby Darling Doll Face Honey using Bittorent, as you can see – they are pretty popular in the USA on Bittorent too. Maybe some of those people will attend the gig ?

Band of Skulls - Baby Darling Doll Face Honey : Bittorent download locations

And finally,  here is a chart showing the top countries for Band of Skulls, also based on where people are downloading their album on Bittorent. It shows the same data displayed in the map above, but aggregated by country and shown as a bar chart. Interestingly, their home country Great Britain comes in at 3rd position, behind USA and Canada.

Band of Skulls - Top regions for Bittorent downloads - Click to expand

Why not check out the gig if you’re going to SXSW? Visit their MySpace page for the dates – We’ll be there!

The NME Awards have long prided themselves on being an anti-award show event, and while this year’s affair was rather more civilised than previous years they still managed to fit in some decapitated heads, a rock star cat fight and a game of catchphrase… However amidst all the debauchery some interesting stats and trends can still be found.

Muse and Kasabian were the two biggest winners on the night picking up two awards each. Muse fended off competition from Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys, Biffy Clyro and Oasis to pick up the Best British Band award. They also picked up an award for Best Band Website so it’s no wonder they have the biggest online presence of all the bands nominated in the Best British Band category.

The below bar chart shows total fan numbers for the Best British Band nominees across a spread of social networking sites.

Best British Band - Click to Expand

Bombay Bicycle Club took home the award for Best New Band, previous winners of this award include Kings of Leon, Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes so they are certainly in good company. However they have had a slow start to the year as you can see by the below trend graph. This shows Myspace plays since the begging of this year, The XX are racking up the play count with Bombay Bicycle Club appearing near the bottom of the graph.

Best New Band - Click to Expand

We see a similar trend in the Best Solo Artist artist category, Jamie T even admitted he’d had a ‘stop-start year’. Florence is way out in front with her play count and we can see the winner of the award Jamie T down at the bottom of the graph.

Best Solo Artist - Click to Expand

The eagle eyed among you may have spotted that there is a nominee missing off this graph. As you can see in the following graph her sheer popularity makes it hard to compare Miss GaGa to the other nominee’s.
(For reference the multi-coloured line along the bottom of the graph represent the other nominee’s…)

Best Solo w/ Lady Gaga - Click to Expand

And finally here’s a nice graph showing the effect of the NME Awards on the winners play count. The artists plays all begin to rise on the morning after the awards and continued to rise through the day.

The NME Effect - Click to Expand

It’s always interesting to see the impact of conventional media (TV/Radio/Print) on the digital realm. However seeing as the play count only rises the day after the awards, it is more likely that the reporting of the awards in various blogs, news posts and tweets that has prompted this rise in play count.