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

It shows a very significant spike in activity around the album, but how common is this? Do all artists get a huge increase in Facebook fans for every album release? Does it make a difference how popular or established the artist is? What is classed as a big spike or a small one – how well did my artist do? And why should I care?

That last question is easy to answer, the more fans on social networks you have, the more fruitful engaging with them will be. Tell them about new gigs or releases, offer merchandise to them, etc. It’s obvious that the more fans you have online, the more response you will get from direct online promotion. The other questions are a bit more tricky, and we’ll try to answer them in this post, so read on…

Looking at the data

What I did was to automatically measure the size of the peaks after an album release (like the Lady Gaga one above) for around 1500 US album releases from the top 1000 artists over the last two years. One constraint I decided to use for this investigation was to restrict the data to what we have available via our API, so in principle anyone could run a similar analysis. Of course, these constraints aren’t exactly restrictive as we make available all the data for the top 1000 artists anyway.

The first thing is to ensure that we compare like with like, so I split the top 1000 artists into three tiers, with the combined popularity of each tier being equal (area under the curve) [see graph below]. The results of this are interesting in themselves:

• Tier 1 : 40 artists
• Tier 2 : 183 artists
• Tier 3 : 777 artists

This means that for the top 1000 artists on Facebook, 33% of all activity is down to just 40 artists, and popularity wise you need the top 777 long tail artists to match the top 40.

Now that we have our three sets of artists (you can see them here if you want) we can start looking at their trend data. I grabbed the time series Facebook Fan data for all 1000 artists from our API, some summary data and their album release events from Musicbrainz.

To show the general impact I compared the number of fans gained for each artist in each tier during the 14 days before the release to the number gained over the 14 days after the release (inclusive of the release date). It’s quite a crude measure but it serves our purposes well to give a rough overview of impact, especially with the fairly large sample size being used. We can do some more rigorous time series analysis / projections another day.

If I plot the impact as a percentage change in the number of friends gained before and after for the Tier 1 artists on a histogram, it looks like this:

The graph shows in general, releasing an album gives a positive impact on the number of Facebook fans! (seems obvious), with an average at around a 25% increase. That means that on average, a Tier 1 artist will get 25% more fans over the two weeks after a release compared to the two weeks before. It also shows that some bands actually get fewer fans the two weeks after than the two before. Working out the precise reasons for this is an exercise for the reader, but some reasons may include a larger pre-release ramp up compared to post-release, the album being a re-release or the artist not being particularly active on Facebook.

You might have noticed that red line on the graph called “T1 Random”. I put this in to compare the general trend of the social network to the impact caused by an album release. I generated 300 randomly placed ‘events’ and measured the number of fans before and after the random event. Think of it as the ‘average’ trend for randomly selected two week intervals. As you can see it’s further left than the album release impact line, confirming that album release events do increase fan activity above the average. Interestingly the average (T1 Random) line shows a higher value for positive increases than negative, which illustrates the growth of Facebook in general.

The graphs below show the same for Tier 2 and Tier 3 artists:

It shows that Tier 2 and Tier 3 artists have a similar impact to each other, and they tail off slower that Tier 1 artists, showing they have more room to grow than the more successful artists.

The histograms above are plotted for the range -200% to +200% to show the typical trends. There were however some outliers (very large increases) that we can take a look at now.

To show these I’ve taken each album release for the the artists in each tier and plotted them against the impact they created. The graph below shows this for Tier 1 artists:

This really illustrates the difference between impact caused by an album release event (blue) and the average trend for the network (red). Looking at the same for Tier 2 and Tier 3 show some interesting differences to Tier 1:

You can see that T2 and T3 are much more variable, and in some cases get an impact in excess of 2000% ! This is because those artists didn’t have many fans to start with so they have a lot of room to grow, and small absolute changes in their trend correspond to high percentage changes day on day. Imagine you have only one fan then the next month you get 2000 from your album release – that’s a 200,000% increase. A Tier 1 artist like Lady Gaga isn’t likely to get that percentage increase any time soon because she’s already got the majority of her fans (a 200,000% increase in Lady Gaga monthly fans on Facebook is around the same as the population of the world…).

Just out of interest, I’ll show the graph of the difference between impact and the network average for Tier 1 artist album releases on Facebook (the difference between the red and blue line for Tier 1 above):

You can see around 125 releases showed a small negative difference to the average, where as around 170 give a positive impact, but the magnitude is much higher for the positives.

Conclusion

That’s all great, but after all this you’re probably wondering how good is good and how bad is bad. Well I’ve created this handy look up table for anyone who wants to know if their album release had a low, average or high impact on Facebook fans!

You can use Musicmetric to measure the Impact values for your band.

The table above also shows that for Tier 2 artists, their average impact is lower than both Tier 1 and Tier 3, this could indicate that the majority of Tier 2 artists have reached the peak of their Facebook popularity, and don’t have much more space to grow, or they are not very active on Facebook.

It also shows the high variance that Tier 3 artists have in album release impact because of the factors mentioned previously.

Future Investigation

Clearly there is room to expand on these findings, we could do the same for plays over time, for singles rather than albums or even gigs. There is also room to improve the time series analysis using more advanced time series modelling algorithms. Check out our API documentation and T&C’s if you’re interested in doing something similar.

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.

But one band that has chosen to buck this social media marketing trend in the last year, and as a result has been a little trickier to track, is Manchester 4-piece WU LYF (pronounced ‘Woo Life’). Instead of focusing themselves across the major social networks, they have chosen to cultivate mystery about the band and to maintain a level of anonymity by refusing interviews by the press, and by only releasing a limited amount of information, photos of the band and music via their website. And their website, which is chock-full of semi-religious iconography, evocative imagery and enigmatic text, only serves to heighten curiosity about them.

It soon becomes clear from the website that WU LYF is more than just a band. For those in and around it, it is more like a lifestyle choice – as well as being: a club, a gang and an organisation. In fact, The Lucifer Youth Foundation, from which their acronymic name derives (the first two letters stand for ‘World Unite!’), is actually described on their website as a “not-for-profit organisation”. In order to be a part of it, you need to pay a £15 membership fee (+£3.50 p&p) and adopt a set of disciplines and interests including making art, music and film; and be prepared to indulge in petty crime, money-making and “busting heads”. In return, you will receive, among other things: music, discounted entry to gigs, a statement of intent, and “involvement and a democratic input with all LYF activity”. But don’t worry, if this all seems like a little too much commitment, and a bit dangerous, you can just buy their new album for £9.99.

All this esotericism, and the band’s clandestine activity, has as you can imagine driven the music industry crazy with curiosity, and made them even keener to get a piece of the action. But the band continue to reject much of the attention and to perpetuate the secrecy that surrounds them by operating in the shadows of the sub-culture.

To add further frustration to the music industry, WU LYF’s self-released debut album Go Tell Fire To The Mountain totally lives up to expectation – exceeds it, even. Their song lyrics – all available to read on their website – are abundant with biblical imagery of blood, fire, mountains and caves, and are delivered by the rasping impassioned vocal of front-man Ellery Roberts. And their atmospheric music, which often builds to crescendo, combines church-organ keyboard sounds, Xx-style guitar reverb and syncopated drum rhythms, to entrancing and dramatic effect.

WU LYF have apparently declared they have plan three albums before they disband, so they are definitely one to watch in the coming months as they continue to try to avoid the enticement of the traditional music industry and a conventional path to bigger success. Whatever the outcome, they have already proved that there is more to getting noticed than being active on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they suddenly make bands operating on these, and other social platforms, seem very unhip indeed.

Despite their elusivity, we at Musicmetric will have find plenty of data to track on WU LYF. We will be monitoring websites that mention the band and their releases, and analysing the sentiment of comments made there. We will also be collecting data from the social networks frequented by their fans, as well as, P2P networks used to trade their music.

So why not follow the effect of this ‘mystery’ marketing strategy by adding WU LYF to the artists you follow on the Musicmetric App?

Toby Burton

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.

If we take a look at the Musicmetric graph below, we can see significant increases in daily plays, comments and fans added on Tinie Tempah’s YouTube page that coincide with the Glastonbury weekend, and the Friday of his Wireless gig.

Tinie Tempah released his debut album Disc-Overy last year and has had two number one singles in the UK with Pass Out and Written In The Stars, the latter peaking at number 12 in the Billboard singles chart in the US, where he is currently being promoted heavily. The positive reception Tinie’s music has been getting across social networks where he is active is clearly indicated in the graph below, which shows the distribution of sentiment from articles mentioning a combination of his recent releases (1 = very negative, 5 = very positive).

If you saw Tinie Tempah at Hop Farm, or indeed at any of his other festival shows, it would be great to hear what you thought.

Toby Burton

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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.

When looking at the the Release Sentiment graph for ‘Party Rock’, we can see that the highest rating, is for rating number 4/5, meaning that, in the majority of cases, articles written about the song have had generally positive things to say, and that both critically and on personal blogs, etc., the song has been well received.

However, the next highest rating number is 3, which means that those articles written had an overall neutral rating of the song, meaning that quite a few people are still ‘on-the-fence’ about the band, and could be potentially swayed either positively or negatively by the group’s second release. Only time will tell if they’re new releases will be as catchy as ‘Party Rock Anthem’, or have the power to keep this band in the limelight.

LMFAO Online Review Sentiment Distribution

Katy B

Katy B is another pop artist getting hype in all the right places – as we can see in the app, included in her Top Websites section are the highly influential, drownedinsound.com, nme.com, bbc.co.uk and guardian.co.uk.

This is reflected in her social network activity. As you can see, her amount of plays on the site Last.fm dramatically climbed since the end of March, which correlates up to around the time that she released her album, On A Mission on April 4th this year.

Katy B Last.fm Plays and Release Dates

The Blackout

Welsh rockers, The Blackout have actually been making music together since 2003 and have quite a cult following in the Rock and Indie world. However, their new album, Hope, could possibly be the key to unlock them to Top 40 success.

The band released the album on the 4th of April. As this chart clearly shows, The Blackout saw a considerable increase of fans on sites Twitter, Facebook and Last.Fm following this date.

The Blackout Social Network Activity

However, more interestingly, when we take a look at the Top Regions data collected from torrents for The Blackout, then the second most popular country for downloading torrents of The Blackout’s music is Australia, which suggests that the bands influence stretches rather further than their Welsh origins, so might be one to watch out for. We hope their managers and marketers are taking note and using these stats to maximise their potential.

The Blackout BitTorrent Top Regions

Ellie and Marina's Total Social Network Fans

Looking at the bar chart above, sites focused on updates and networking (Facebook, Twitter) show that Ellie has far more followers. However on the majority of sites where visual/audio content is available (Myspace, YouTube and iLike) the numbers of fans are closely matched and Marina is often the frontrunner. Looking at the breakdown of fan growth over time we can see how these relationships developed during the year.

The graphs below show that at the time of the BBC announcement both artists were fairly even in terms of online followers. Whilst Marina’s fan numbers have remained fairly level, Ms Gouldings have grown consistently. Ellie’s “Your Song”, an Elton John cover, was used in the John Lewis Christmas TV ad campaign and consequently reached number 2 in the charts, her highest charting single of the year. This explains the sudden rise in followers towards the end of the year and is confirmation of the benefits to an artist of a well placed sync. In contrast Marina’s last single of the year, “Shampain”, was released with little other than an indie music video and only reached a sorry 141 in the charts in October.

Ellie and Marina's Facebook Fans

Ellie and Marina's Twitter Followers

Interestingly, despite relatively weak chart success compared to Goulding, Marina’s tracks and videos received equal and often more online attention than Ellies, as shown in the graphs below. This suggests that those fans buying music differ to those listening and watching online and vice versa. So as labels search to find new ways to promote their artists in the face of dwindling album sales perhaps Myspace plays and YouTube hits can no longer helpfully predict an artist’s chart potential.

Ellie and Marina's YouTube Views

Ellie and Marina's Myspace Plays

Ellie has ended the year with a number 1 album and several top 10 hits but now finds herself fronting ad campaigns and featuring on rap tracks to remain current with today’s throwaway pop fans. Whilst Marina’s singles have rarely made it into the Top 20 she has continued to play sell out shows across the country, ending the year with a sold out show at the Camden Roundhouse. What she lacks in top ten hits she may be making up for in credibility. As we enter 2011 it seems that Ellie may have won this battle but Marina may just have the staying power to win the war.

Marcel Legane

Lady Gaga - Youtube Billionaire

The video below plots her growth in fans on the major social networks over the last 10 months, and quite nicely shows the huge surge in Facebook fans during the introduction of the ‘Like’ button earlier this year.

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

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!

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.