Although the Big Four have had their differences over the last 25-30 years – this year Anthrax, Metallica, and Slayer all celebrate 30 years together – their shared legacy, time, and (ahem) maturity, seems to have erased any remaining bad feeling. If performances on the Sonisphere Tour so far are anything to go by, fans will even see musicians from all four groups playing together on a song by seminal new wave of heavy metal band, Diamond Head, at the end of Metallica’s set.

By individually adding Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax to your artists on the Musicmetric App., you are able to easily combine and then compare the social media activity, or other data, in one graph. I have done just that so we can look at how the Big Four compare across some of the social networks on which they and their fans are active:

Metallica are the undisputed number one thrash metal band of all time, and the above graph of daily plays, views, comments and fans added on their YouTube networks certainly seems to visualise this rather well. No guess as to which line represents Metallica!

Again, in the Facebook graph below, Metallica’s peaks in activity seem to dwarf those of the ‘Other Three’. It is also interesting to see how the bands’ activity in the lead up to Sonisphere follows a similar pattern, corresponding with announcements and buzz about the imminent festival.

Interestingly, Metallica fare less well on Twitter (below), where in comparison to the Other Three, they see the least of the social network activity.

If you are going to Sonisphere, which of the Big Four bands are you most looking forward to seeing?

Toby Burton

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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.

Wireless Festival

1-3 July, Hyde Park, London
More info…

Steadily increasing in size, we come to one of London’s own festivals, although this one is anything but “boutique”: the 65,000-capacity Hyde Park-dwelling Live Nation behemoth that is Wireless Festival celebrates its 7th birthday this year.

Grace Jones, Pulp, Metronomy and The Horrors will be among this year’s headliners at the 3 day festival. Pulp’s suprise slot at Glasto last weekend has already had critics frothing in their wake so we were very keen to take a gander at how their comeback has been building up online.

One unique thing about Musicmetric is its ability to track torrent downloads via peer to peer networks. This can be an invaluable source of data, showing the reality of who is, in fact, listening to what music, regardless of legality. Let’s look at the numbers of people refreshing themselves with the hits so they can join the crowd and sing along and check out bit torrent downloads of Pulp’s classic album “Different Class”:

There has been a steady stream of downloading going on, ranging from 10 down to 0 downloads a day over about a two month period. If say that this averages at 5 or so downloads every day, and you figure that this is an album that came out 16 years ago, the implications could be enormous as far as continued exposure for a band that have just reformed. Viewed in the light of lost revenue perhaps more sobering, but how many T Shirts does that indicate they can probably shift? No matter what your objectives are the data is an invaluable indicator of their longevity.

At the time of writing, Friday tickets for Wireless had sold out, but you can still get tickets for Saturday and Sunday by following this link.

The Shoreditch 1234 Festival

July 9th, Shoreditch Park
More info…

The Shoreditch 1234 Festival, now in its 4th year, is the capital’s own 10,000 capacity boutique festival held in Shoreditch Park each year, celebrating cutting edge music and culture. Conceived by long time promoter and music aficionado Sean McClusky and partnered with the likes of Rough Trade, Vice, and Artrocker, it has quickly become one of the local highlights of many a Londoner’s summer gig calender, and one of the best places to catch some of the brightest up-and-coming acts to emerge on the music scene in the UK and beyond.

If we look at the data chart for number of fans added on Twitter and Facebook, we can see that The Raveonettes are holding fairly steady at just under 200 fans added per day on Facebook, with much less activity on Twitter. Obviously this says their Facebook fanbase is much stronger (with over 90,000 total fans), which is most likely due to the fact that, though they have over 10,000 Twitter followers, Twitter has a much smaller total user-base than Facebook does. These are important things to keep in mind when looking at the charts and comparing the numbers relative to each other.

The rest of the excellent festival lineup includes Fair Ohs, Stay+ (formerly Christian AIDS), Black Lips, The Proper Ornaments, and Dam Mantle among many, many others. Full lineup at the1234shoreditch.com.

Tip: Get discounted Shoreditch 1234 tickets here before they sell out.

Latitude Festival

14-17 July, Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk
More info…

From the folks who bring you the Reading and Leeds Festivals, the much loved (and a bit more laid back) 35,000-capacity Latitude Festival returns to Suffolk for its 6th year this summer. According to the BBC, festival organizers Festival Republic told BBC Suffolk that it had signed up to host the festival at the site for a further 15 year, so they’re obviously planning to stick around. Latitude is the only festival where seeing pink and blue sheep isn’t simply the effect of ingesting certain questionable substances.

Suede, the Cribs, Cocknbullkid, Wanda Jackson, and Dry the River are among the performing musical ranks, while other elements of the fest include theatre, art, comedy, cabaret, poetry, politics, dance and literary angles.

Looking at East London lads Dry the River, who are a relatively new band to the festival scene, it will be interesting to see the effect that playing Latitude will have on their numbers. For a smaller act, a festival spot can act as a real boost to a band’s fanbase. It’s a no-brainer, really; a one stop shop for exposure to masses of people who might not otherwise hear your material, and a chance to play alongside scores of other, more established acts who’s fans’ musical interests might just cross over if you’re lucky.

Tickets for Latitude can be found here.

End of the Road Festival

2-4 September, Larmer Tree Gardens, North Dorset
More info…

One of the last festivals of the season is the aptly named End of the Road Festival. If you’re a fan of roaming peacocks, papier-mâché and beards, then this one is probably already on your radar. If not, listen up. Started in 2006 by two friends, End of the Road is an independent festival focusing on alternative and alt folk music. It takes place in idyllic surrounding of the rolling Dorset hills, and offers up one of the most relaxed festival experiences you’ll find on this fair isle.

Headliners for 2011 include Joanna Newsom, The Fall, Lykke Li, Mogwai and Wild Beasts.

Take a look at Musicmetric’s Combined Sentiment stats for Mogwai, shown below:

We can see from looking at the chart, that the majority of what people are saying about Mogwai online in blogs and other articles is positive or very positive. A great festival performance, or even a newsworthy event happening during the set, if executed correctly or, in the case of fate, if the rock gods smile upon a band, can push this rating in the right direction, obviously bolstering a band’s image and generating good PR and boosting popularity. On the other hand, a sub par performance can really damage an act’s reputation. This is reflected in the act’s sentiment scores, and reflects the general opinion of those journalists and bloggers who can help make or break a band’s career.

Keep your eyes peeled for a follow up post where we’ll recap some festival highlights and take another look at the stats to see what effects festival exposure has had on the bands’ numbers. See you out in the field!

Alex Jones

Sheeran, whose distinctive acoustic sound mixes sound loops with beat-boxing and hip-hop rhythm, made his Glastonbury debut this year playing a total of 8 gigs over the weekend, including a headline set on the BBC Introducing stage, and one or two impromptu, guerrilla-style, performances for which he is becoming well known. Over the last two years, it is a combination of his hard work on the live music circuit and his engagement with social networking sites like Twitter and YouTube, that have built him a large underground following in the UK.

The reward for this hard work came at the beginning of the year when Sheeran signed a record contract with Atlantic Records, through which he releases his debut album, entitled + on 19th September. The first single from it, The A Team, went to number 3 in the charts the weekend before Glastonbury, and has been watched over 3.5m times on YouTube. It sold 58,000 copies in the first week, making it the highest selling, and charting, single of 2011 so far. Pretty impressive.

It was as a result of posting a music video for the song You Need Me, I Don’t Need You to YouTube, via the youth broadcasting website SB.TV in 2010, that Sheeran got his first big break in the form of an invitation to tour with mainstream UK rapper Example. And clearly YouTube continues to work well as a marketing tool for Sheeran, a fact reflected by the steep upward trend in the Musicmetric graph of his YouTube activity, below.

Sheeran also has a large following on Twitter – over 114,000 followers – and his success on this social media channel is helped by his personal engagement with his followers, to whom he can often be seen replying and chatting. The Musicimetric graph, below, shows activity on his Twitter and Facebook networks, the most recent peaks corresponding to the announcement that The A Team charted at number 3 last week.

Sheeran is by no means the first artist to use social media networking websites for DIY marketing campaigns, or even to engage more directly with fans. But he is one of a new breed of up and coming artists that understands the potential and importance of building a following this way – “social media has been a great help” he told the BBC, recently.

It is this following that has taken him into the Top 10 of the Glastonbury Band Tracker, where he is the only artist yet to release a major label album. Certainly, if the buzz continues to grow, which looks very likely, it won’t be long before Ed Sheeran becomes a mainstream act and he is headlining bigger festival stages around the world.

Toby Burton

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

Our business is based on the analysis of all artists, including those in the long tail of popularity, up and coming artists of all genres who may not be so well tagged as well as high profile acts. This coupled with the fact that knowing the similarity between artists is essential for some of our analytics tools we decided it was beneficial to develop a custom method for inferring similarities between artists.

At present we are experimenting with a modified version of the iterative network ranking algorithm. More usually employed by search engines to rank the relevance of results, we have combined them with machine learning algorithms trained to spot relevant features and to correctly identify the subject of the text being analysed gathered by our web crawlers. This allows us to accurately classify artists into parent classes and child classes. Artists can partially belong to multiple classes and are weighted by their relevance. This data is then used in a clustering algorithm which successfully gauges how similar two artists are.