Good news for our more statistically inclined API users and anyone else who wants to run advanced statistical analysis on Musicmetric data.

Andrew Morgan (@minkymorgan) has built some helper functions in R for the Musicmetric API. These allow quick and easy access to our time series data for any artist given their ID (or any third party ID including Last.fm, Twitter and Facebook), and for top artists based on our chart api endpoints.

The code uses the Quantmod library, which has a whole bunch of time series analysis and charting features.

As we’re heading towards the end of another productive day here at Musicmetric, we were wondering what people on the web might be starting to listen to right now. You know, to make sure we’re in with the cool crowd before going to Da Club later.

So we hacked together a little chart using our real time play monitoring that ranks the artists by the change in their play counts online over the last hour. This ranks higher the artists that people have started to listen to over the last hour.

Here’s the result for 16:00 to 17:00 GMT today:

1 Maroon 5 – Moves Like Jagger [feat. Christina Aguilera]
2 Britney Spears – I Wanna Go
3 Chris Brown – Beautiful People
4 LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
5 OneRepublic – Good Life
6 Cobra Starship – You Make Me Feel…
7 Jason Aldean – Dirt Road Anthem
8 Lady Antebellum – Just A Kiss
9 AFI – Beautiful Thieves
10 Gym Class Heroes – Stereo Hearts Feat. Adam Levine
11 Demi Lovato – Skyscraper
12 Jay-Z – Otis
13 Colette Carr – We Do It (Primo)
14 Dierks Bentley – Am I The Only One
15 Miguel – Sure Thing (Main Version)
16 Brad Paisley – Remind Me (Duet With Carrie Underwood)
17 Lady Gaga – You And I
18 Jake Owen – Barefoot Blue Jean Night
19 Coldplay – Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall
20 Avril Lavigne – Smile

And good news everyone – we’ve even made it into a Spotify playlist for your delectation right here! Sure it’s a bit mainstream, but what do you expect – this is the internet. When we’ve got some time to spare we’ll throw in some personalisation.

Since Michael Eavis’s surprising comment to The Times about Glastonbury Festival being “on the way out” due to festival apathy and the economic downturn, there has been much discussion about the state of the UK’s festival scene.

Today we’re going to look at how releasing an album impacts the fan activity on social networks, focusing on Facebook Likes. It’s clear that for some artists the impact is huge, check out the graph below that shows number of likes per day for Lady Gaga during the month she released the new album Born This Way:

One of the aspects of Musicmetric’s data analysis involves tracking the activity of artists and their fans across the major social networking channels on which they are active, including Facebook, Twitter MySpace and YouTube. One of my tasks as a data researcher is to check that the Musicmetric database is up to date with new bands and new releases.

This is made easier by the fact that these days, in order to raise their profile, engage with their fans and promote their music releases, the majority of up and coming bands have a presence on all the major social networks. And it is often through these networks that I can find out more about a band, and establish how popular they are becoming.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) claimed the digital album ‘came of age’ last year. According to its statistics, 21m digital albums were sold in 2010, representing 17.5% of all album sales and a growth of 30.6% on 2009’s figures. However, this failed to halt the decline of combined sales of digital and physical albums, which they say fell by 7%. This decline is largely the result of increasing numbers of illegal downloads, which reached record levels and amounted to three-quarters of all downloads last year, according to a study carried out on behalf of the BPI.

One way to discourage music piracy is to use creative marketing strategies to heighten the experience and the enjoyment of acquiring music legally. The Kaiser Chiefs, whose new album The Future Is Medieval was released digitally earlier this month, have done just that.

We’ve had a very busy few months here at Musicmetric, and because it has been a bit quiet on the update front we have decided to give you an idea of what we’ve been cooking up behind the scenes. As a sneak preview of what’s to come in the near future we opened up some of our Movie torrent data to coincide with the Movie Hack Day in Berlin last weekend. Movies I hear you cry?? That’s awesome, but how is it relevant to Musicmetric?!

Well it just so happens that when we set up the company we called it Semetric Ltd and our plan is to be rapidly expanding into all areas of digital entertainment, including movies. Our technology has been developed from day one with the ability to track not just trends in the music space, but any space where activity occurs online. Our sentiment analysis algorithms work just as well for movie reviews as they do for music reviews and our torrent tracking system doesn’t care if it’s monitoring file sharing for a music album or a movie, it’s all just data.

Our semantic meta-database lies at the core of this, knowing about relations between the different domain areas we track and their own specific properties and allowing data to be requested from our API in a number of ways using a whole array of third party ID’s.

If you’re interested in learning more about our plans, or want to get involved then contact us and we’ll have a chat or sign up for an API key right now. In the mean time head over to the Movie API documentation to get a flavour of what’s to come…

After a long weekend of API hacking, staying up too late and travelling we’ve finally recovered from the Berlin Music Hack Day. This year it was hosted at the MTV Networks Berlin HQ, and was the perfect setting for us to launch the Musicmetric Developer API.

We attended in force (unfortunately Ben could not attend again due to VISA problems again – he does actually work for us, we promise…) to present our new API and give prizes for the best hacks built using it.

The event was very well organised by the SoundCloud guys (Johan & Roel), with a great presence from music tech companies including 7Digital, Spotify, Echonest, Seevl, Songkick and more. The MTV offices was an awesome venue to host the event, with great facilities and a free canteen courtesy of the sponsors!

Response to our API was great, especially since we only launched it on the day with little to no notice for hackers coming with ideas for their projects already in mind. We gave two prizes for hacks using our API, awarded to the following teams, who received a pair of lovely headphones and limited edition awesome-green Musicmetric T-Shirts:

Tractor
By Niko Felger, Phil Cowans
The Songkick guys built a chrome browser plugin using the Musicmetric, Songkick, Last.fm and Soundcloud API’s that does entity detection on a page to identify what bands are being mentioned, then shows a bunch of stats and info about the artist in a dropdown.

Senti(Com)ment
By Nikola Chochkov
Nikola from Soundcloud thought of a great use of the Sentiment analysis API: To calculate the average sentiment for comments made by users on Soundcloud tracks. This project has loads of scope for expansion into other areas of Soundcloud, including forum discussions.

We even managed to find time to build a hack of our own:

RealTimeSentiTweetGagasm
This pulls in Lady Gaga mentions using the Twitter streaming API and feeds it through our Sentiment Analysis service, and uses the Last.fm API to grab the number of ‘likes’, scrobbles and ‘bans’ for the artist, allowing the the number of positive and negative tweets to be compared in realtime to the number of likes and bans on Last.fm. We’ll be putting the source code on Github shortly.

We’ll be sponsoring the Barcelona Music Hack Day on June 16th – 17th so see you there!

We are pleased to announce our freshly rolled-out API v1 service. We have been busy putting lots of our data into a nice API and are very excited to see what can be made with it. You may have already seen an incomplete sneak preview at the SF Musichackday, but this version is much more complete.

Full details of our available services can be found at http://developer.musicmetric.com

Principally, we have three distinct sections to our API:

Sentiment analyzer

Our sentiment analyzer determines the tone of some text. This can be used to determine if, for example, a music review is favourable or not. It returns a score from 1 (very negative) to 5 (very positive). It has been trained on music related text so works best with music reviews etc.

Artist trend data

Our API exposes artist timeseries data for a selection of social networks and the web in general. We provide daily changes in fans/followers, comments, daily play counts, web mention tracking as well as an overview summarizing an artist’s metrics and how they’ve done in the last 24 hours.

Artist fan demographic and geo-location

Provides details about the composition and location of fans of an artist. This includes the distribution of the age of fans as well as city and country level geo-location distributions.

We are very excited to see what applications are built using our data and services!

Musicmetric is at Liverpool Sound City and we have some exciting news – Live right now is our Liverpool Sound City Fantracker.

Check out the app at http://soundcity.musicmetric.com, it’s literally just launched and so far we’ve been hearing people love using it on the iPhone, so check it out on your platform and let us know how it is for you : )