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.

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.

One use of this analysis is that given an artist, we can find another artist with the closest trend in some variable over time – for example MySpace plays per hour. Alternatively we could generate a list of artists who are increasing in popularity in a certain way, or show which artists have had a brief surge in activity – maybe caused an album release or gig.

Because we store all the data indefinitely and in such a way that we can access it very rapidly, we can run regular batch analysis on the contents of our data warehouse to unlock interesting information.

In this example, we will compare the play count time series data for the top 20,000 artists by total plays on MySpace. It is important to consider that some trends may follow each other with a time lag, so we compare the 20K time series at multiple time lags from 0 to 30 days in the past, in 1 day increments. This means the approximate number of time series comparisons our analysis servers must do for this particular problem is 6 Billion, each one comparing hourly resolution data over a period of 4 months.

Let’s take a look at which artist has a similar trend to Kings of Leon:

Kings of Leon and The Fray - MySpace Plays Per Hour

We can see the plays per hour for The Fray seem to be following a similar long term trend to that of Kings of Leon, but offset by the difference in their popularity on MySpace – although they are converging as time goes on. The peaks and troughs also line up, so clearly the fine resolution hourly variation in the data has something to do with the overall use of MySpace at any period in time, not just the popularity of the artist. This is something that can be seen over most MySpace data.

Now let’s look at two artists who have even more similar plays per hour to each other:

Dido and The Clash - MySpace Plays Per Hour

The Clash and Dido show very high similarity for plays per hour on MySpace over the time frame shown in the chart above. A lot of this will have to do with the overall use of MySpace at any period of time, and the fact that the two artists have not had a lot of activity during that period to make their play counts diverge from each other.

Finally, we’ll search for artists that show similar short term peaks to one other. In this case Muse was flagged as a high match for 50 Cent in September 2009, as is clear in the chart below:

Muse and 50 Cent - MySpace Plays Per Hour

If we look at their discographies – we discover that both Muse and 50 Cent made a release on the same day in September.

We’ll investigate the different reasons why two artists might have similar trends to each other in another blog post, so check back soon!

Let’s start off with the big picture. Online Buzz gives an indicator of how many people are talking about an artist on the web. We use clever machines that learn how to cut through the noise and only detect the artist in question.

The chart below shows how the Online Buzz for the band Muse changed since 2006. It shows the number of comments per day about Muse, compared to the overall number of comments about bands.

If we zoom in to the last 6 months as is shown below, we can see the online buzz for Muse has been pretty constant, with a slight increase overall:

If you need a more granular view than Online Buzz, you can check what’s happening on some music social networks in the Social Networks section.

So, below are the MySpace Views and Plays per hour for Muse; the big spike in September shows when they released their single “Uprising”. The peak immediately after that one was the album release:

These charts show a 24 hour moving average for Plays and Views per hour.
That means we take the average number of plays or views for the last 24 hours and plot that on the graph.

This gives a better visualisation of the trend as the raw data can be confusing. Below (in red) we can see what the raw data looks like without the moving average overlaid:

Remember, musicmetric isn’t just limited to superstar bands like Muse. Let’s take a look at some stats for Master Shortie – an up and coming London rapper.

Here is a view of where people follow Master Shortie online:

Looking at some data about those fans, we can see Master Shortie is pretty popular with the ladies:

And their age profile fits a distribution around the 18 year old mark:

Now let’s drill down a bit to see where their MySpace fans live.

The chart below shows that fans of Master Shortie on MySpace are located mainly in the USA and UK:

The overall user demographic of MySpace is pretty biased towards these two countries, so let’s check out the top cities for fans of Master Shortie on Twitter:

Nine of the top 10 cities for locations of fans of Master Shortie on Twitter are in the UK, with only New York showing up for the USA.
Now let’s look at where Master Shortie’s Twitter fans live on a map of the world:

Each one of those circles represents one or more downloads, when you hover over a circle in the musicmetric application with your mouse you can see an instant pop-up of where and how many downloads the circle represents. It even tells you the exact time a download was made.

The darker and more solid the colour, the more downloads are being overlaid onto the same area, giving a really good indication of popularity by region.

Here is the same map for the location of Master Shortie’s fans, this time on MySpace:

Now let’s look at the most influential people relevant to Master Shortie on Twitter.
This will tell you the most relevant people on Twitter to target with marketing material, because they actually care about the artist in question, and are very influential in those circles.

We don’t just calculate this based on the number of followers each person gets, but the number of followers their followers get, and so on.

If that doesn’t make sense, imagine it works a bit like the Google PageRank algorithm, because it does. Someone with a million spam bots following them will have a lower rank than another person who’s only being followed by a few very influential people (like a music magazine or a record label).

Let’s move on to Bittorent data now, and take a look at some charts for Robbie Williams.

The chart below shows the number of peers per hour connected to the torrents for the single Bodies and the new album Reality Killed the Video Star. Just so you know, our Bittorent data is anonymous and aggregated to the city level. Tracking individuals isn’t our game.

And here is the map of locations of people downloading the torrents at 7:00pm yesterday (30th November 2009):

Now prepare yourself for the all time cumulative map for Bittorent downloads of Robbie Williams – Reality Killed the Video Star:

Clearly Robbie is very popular worldwide, so let’s get a closer look below at the largest solid coloured area in the UK and Europe:

To clearly see the top cities, a table is more suitable. Below are the top cities for Robbie Williams – Bodies on Bittorent:

So there you have it!

These were just some of the top functions currently launched in our beta version of musicmetric.

Get ready for our full launch over the next few weeks as we’ll be unveiling a rocking host of extra functions, including twitter activity, results from wider ranging web crawls, sentiment analysis for tracks and artists, more social networks, authority ranking for all sources of data, and individual song tracking.

Plus, we’ll be revealing our advanced analytics functions which allow the whole collection of data to be probed in more detail, picking out patterns, similarities, trends and more.

Our development cycle has been insane and it’s really ramping up now! We’ve hired more full time developers, upgraded our data centre, bought dozens more servers, hundreds of TB of storage… We’re just about ready to explode with data, and we love it.

Keep checking back because the updates will keep coming, and if you just can’t wait then register now to begin tracking everything in real time with a free demo of musicmetric essentials.