Just wanted to let everyone know about a couple of research conferences we’ll be involved with and attending that are coming up quite soon. The first, the Workshop on Music Recommendation and Discovery (WOMRAD) is this Sunday, October 23rd at the Palomar House Hilton in downtown Chicago, co-located with the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys).

I’m co-chairing this workshop (along with the other co-chairs — Amélie Anglade (Soundcloud), Òscar Celma (Gracenote), Paul Lamere (The Echo Nest), and Brian McFee (Computer Audition Lab, University of California San Diego)) which will cover a diverse array of approaches and angles for music recommendation and discovery.

The workshop is part of RecSys 2011, which runs the full week, though I sadly can’t stay for most of the conference aside from our workshop (see below). It should prove to be an interesting day of research. Are you planning on attending? Let us know.

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: