We will also be presenting real world case studies of Musicmetric Pro demonstrating how it can be useful to you and all levels of the industry. We will also present where and how companies have implemented our API to great effect so don’t miss our presentation on Visionary Monday at 4.00pm in the Innovation Factory.

At our stand we will be having an informal drop in “beers and demo” session on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th from 4pm till 6pm.

We will also have a presence at the Midem hack day so head to the presentations or register to meet the hackers if you want to discuss our API and data feeds.

Or catch us at the Music Tech Meetup @midem for networking and drinks on Sunday evening from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. More info here.

Attending from Musicmetric are:

• Gregory Mead – CEO
• Marie-Alicia Chang – Head of Business development
• Jeremy Silver – Chairman
• Jameel Syed – CTO
• Juliana Obeng – Communications executive
• Ben Fields – API / Data lead (Midem Hacker)

You can find us during the conference at stand MEDIUM 12 but if you want to organise a meeting then drop us an email on midem2012@musicmetric.com.

See you in Cannes!

With more and more fans discovering and interacting with bands online, looking at online buzz as a major part of Brand New for 2012 is a fresh and forward looking take. The metrics we chart add a completely new and dimension, arguably giving more realistic insight as to how the artist will fare in the real world – beyond the list and label marketing.

Artists like Lana Del Rey [click for stats] making such a big impact through social media channels (such as YouTube) in the last year only serves to highlight how important these metrics are now for all artists. For MTV to allow an unsigned artist onto their Brand New list (alongside Del Rey) based on online buzz is a great step.

During the course of the unsigned competition The 500 long-list artists together generated the following across social media –

New Fans: 107,181
New Plays: 3,552,848

From the start of the competition and throughout, each artist was tracked by us providing daily statistics on which artists have risen the most in terms of their buzz; an aggregate of votes, plays, new fans and comments.

So congratulations to Context! you can check him out on twitter here

Two and a half years in development, Radio Soulwax is a radio station but not in the conventional sense. Every week, over the next few months, the brothers will be adding a new one hour show to the Radio Soulwax website, and this will culminate in a collection of twenty-four music mixes. These will all remain online in a rotated and continuous loop, and are also available to stream and download via a fully interactive iPhone/iPad/Android application.

What makes Radio Soulwax particularly special is that the songs featured in the shows are all accompanied by an animation of their record sleeves, that moves to the music. Growing up, the Dewaele’s were lucky enough to have access to their DJ-ing father’s extensive record collection, and these records and the memories they stimulate, have to a large extent inspired the project. These musical films, too, are the brothers’ way of paying tribute, albeit digitally, to what is essentially a forgotten art form.

With “too many good ideas to simply release another mix album”, the Dewaeles felt they had to do something bigger and better, and to come up with a new way to share their music mixes, and their passion for popular, and not-so-well-known, music. It has clearly been lovingly and obsessively laboured over, at great expense and with a little help from their friends.

Introversy – a mix of some of the brothers’ favourite song intros, which without the visuals might also inspire a game of Name That Tune – is the one hour teaser that the Dewaeles made available before Radio Soulwax’s official launch this week, and if this represents the quality of what is to come, music fans, fans of animation, comedy, and art, are all in for a real treat in the coming weeks.

Radio Soulwax is a re-invention of the concept of the mix album. It is an utterly unique and innovative direct-to-fan form of music distribution. And what’s more, as the content of the mixes being broadcast cannot be sold because of copyright and publishing legalities, it is absolutely free.

So why not check it out, and then let us know what you think?

Toby Burton

Ben (@alsothings) presented the new additions to the Musicmetric API, and the slideshow can be viewed right here on slide share:

New additions to our API include BitTorrent time series data for an artist (currently global) and new chart end points, which rank a set of artists by their Buzzzz score.

The response to our API was great, particularly towards the sentiment scoring service, with some interesting use cases being explored, with other 150,000 requests being made during the two days. Below we’ve included some hacks that were built using the Musicmetric API:

Potty Mouthed Bands

More info here
By: Johan Uhle

An interesting use case for our sentiment analyser was to pipe song lyrics from MusicMatch into the Musicmetric sentiment analysis API, returning a sentiment score for the song. This data was then of course used to ‘fight’ two artists and return the one with the most negative sentiment as the winner. We really loved this original use case and with some refinement could show some interesting stats on artist lyrics. Johan won the Musicmetric prize for his hack.

AGENDAFEST

More info here
By: Ben Fields, Greg Mead, David Okuniev

This was our own entry to the hackday – a custom festival agenda planner. If you’re attending a large festival and are not sure what cool new artists to check out and when they are playing, then simply enter your last.fm ID or some favourite bands and we’ll generate a customised festival agenda, with artists ranked by their Musicmetric Buzzzz score, so you’re sure not to miss the next big thing in your favourite genre of music. It even shows you some info about the artist from Seevl.net (great API) and a preview clip from 7Digital in case you haven’t heard of them. We’re planning on making this go live in the next few weeks, in time for festival season.

Musichackday Sentiment

More info here
By: Eduard Prats Molner

Eduard gets a special mention for making over 40,000 requests to our API over the two days. His hack pipes tweets into a visualisation showing blue dots for positive tweets and red dots for negative tweets. The size of the dot is related to the confidence score from the sentiment algorithm (how sure it is of the classification). This was an awesome hack and great visualisation.

Jsmad

More info here and direct link here
By: Amos Wenger, Jens Nockert and Matthias Georgi

These guys implemented an MP3 player in pure javascript, which is pretty insane. The Musicmetric API contributes some stats to the artist that is playing if they have a direct match on Musicmetric. They managed to hook it up during the last hour of the hack day… The Javascript MP3 player saw tens of thousands of hits after it went viral on the interwebs – all of them hitting our API too

Allow me to elaborate, if I may…

When Facebook announced their new social plug-ins I was mildly interested, I could now “Like” a band instead of “Become a Fan” not that much of a difference I thought.

I was wrong…

It’s actually had a rather dramatic affect; I give you exibit A…

I'm not a fan of the band but I like their music - click to enlarge

Surprisingly this trend is replicated across a fairly large number of artists. In some cases the increase has been fairly small in others the jump is more pronounced.

The speed and scale of the jump suggests that these artists have been getting a lot of visitors to their Facebook pages but have been unable to convert these visitors to fans linked to their profile. Now with the arrival of the ‘Like’ function artists are able to engage with this previously passive section of their audience.

It does appear that the initial “liking” frenzy is subsiding so it will be interesting to see whether the effect will be a long lasting one or whether people will begin to view even “liking” a band as too much of a commitment. We do expect that the new increased inter-linkedness of Facebook, and abundance of ‘Like’ buttons will have a positive effect on fan engagement.

Edit: Thanks Brendan for the message below. Some of the large effect is due to people logging into Facebook and being prompted to automatically link their profile to the profiles of the “Favourite Artists” listed in their Info section. It will be interesting to see the longer term effect is, so we’ll post an update in a week to see.

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!

It features a new, improved design and some useful new functions, which are outlined below.

We’ll be releasing further functionality and data in the upcoming weeks, so look out for more updates.

New Functionality

Improved artist selection panel

We’ve rebuilt the artist selection screen, it’s now much faster to find new artists to track, and to manage your tracked artists.

Data exports

Data exports are now available for raw datasets, allowing further analysis to be made using third party applications.

New help files

Tabs now contain information panels to help make sense of the data being presented to the user.

Improved homepage

Our new application homepage is now live, showing top 20 charts as well as Musicmetric news, keeping users up to date with everything Musicmetric related.

New Design

Intuitive navigation

Navigation between tabs and sections of the application has been improved, making it easier and faster to get around the data.

Data selection

Browsing and changing between data sets is now much easier in the latest release, allowing cross comparisons and data drill down.

Load times

Application and data load times have been improved, as have the load times for drill down functionality on time series data and maps.

If anyone has any feedback regarding the new application release, please contact support@musicmetric.com and we will be happy to assist.

The reports show in depth analysis on the state of the music industry in the UK, and are sent out to all members of the BPI.

The latest report was published today, and we look forward to supplying more data and insight as a regular feature with the BPI in the future.

BPI Market Report - Musicmetric page

We were picked from over 120 submissions by an advisory board of industry experts drawn from the UK community including: VC’s, export specialists, legal experts, journalist and industry pundits, to take part in the Digital Mission to SXSWi.

Digital Mission is organised by Chinwag and UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), enabling digital companies to expand into overseas markets and attract investment outside the UK.

If anyone is going to SXSW and would like to meet up – just give us a call!

We hope to see you there!

The Musicmetric team.