You don’t?

Well whatever…she did and at the time she was pleased as punch.

But now it appears she’s not…. apparently the BRIT Awards are one big record label conspiracy…

So was the BRIT Award worthless? Well just look what it did to her Social Network Buzz…

The BRIT Effect - click to expand

I put that big arrow there so you can see the affect… or lack of it.

Similarly there was little change in her MySpace Views & Plays. In fact the BRIT Awards coincide with a drop in plays & views but I would put that down to a regular fluctuation rather than something caused by the Award show.

MySpace Ain't Moving - click to expand

There is one site where the award had an affect… or should I say Twaffect?

No. I don’t think I should…

Twimeline of Twollowers - click to expand

As you can see Lily had a steady increase of followers from the day of the Award Show onwards; although to be fair this was probably caused by her performance at the Awards rather than the Award itself.

Alternatively it could have been her drunken acceptance speech which made people think “Hey, Lily’s pretty outspoken and entertaining. I wonder if she’s on Twitter?” In fact the second arrow shows the start of a peak which is more than likely caused by Lily’s spat with Courtney Love at the NME Awards.

What do you think? Are award shows relevant anymore? Or are they just a place for celebrities to get drunk and embarrass themselves (and then reap the publicity benefits…)

Answers on a postcard please!

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.

Check out this chart showing when people are wishing Merry Christmas to the world on Twitter.

The chart shows the number of Merry Christmas tweets per 10 minute time interval since the 22nd December.

Merry Christmas on Twitter - Number of Tweets per 10min interval

Who’s going to get the No.1 single this Christmas?

Twitter activity per hour - Rage Against The Machine and Joe McElderry - Click for larger view

Check out the recent activity on Twitter for people tweeting about Rage Against The Machine. The chart below shows number of mentions per hour:

Notice the daily variation due to time zones causing regular peaks when people are awake and tweeting.

Will tomorrows peak be even bigger than today? Sign up for a free musicmetric Essentials demo and find out :-)

How far will they go?

Why don’t you check out a free trial of the musicmetric Essentials desktop application and see this chart for your own artists!

This is a screen shot of the analytics available in the musicmetric application.