We’ve put together a series of stats to show the massive online response from fans since last Friday’s sad news of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch’s death. The stats range from file-sharing figures to online plays and top file-sharing cities.

Firstly, our torrent data shows that file-sharing of Beastie Boys albums has rocketed by 300% since Friday 4th May with the biggest spike in downloads occurring on Saturday 5th.

Licence to Ill, Beastie Boys’ debut album released in 1983, is the most popular among file-sharers. The top city for torrents is their hometown of New York with LA, Chicago, Philadelphia and Toronto making up the top five.

Similar spikes were seen across social networks with regards to numbers of online fans added per day (which increased by 700%)  and total online plays (which increased by 2000%) as shown in the graphs below.

These figures correspond with sales figures released last week by Billboard which put License To Ill back into the Billboard 200 alongside Paul’s Boutique, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, Ill Communication, Check Your Head and Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science.

The Great Escape 2012: Musicmetric ones to watch

You have 460 bands, 30 venues across the seaside city of Brighton and three days to see what you can. You have an extensive line-up list in your pocket, but how are you to start planning your Great Escape experience? These bands are so fresh out of the blocks that fewer than 80 of the 460 have been fileshared, sugesting a lack of recorded material. Finding the essential bands to see can be a bit of a minefield.

Don’t panic, Musicmetric has your back. We have compiled lists highlighting the rising stars at the Great Escape, by tracking digital metrics on every Great Escape artist from filesharing figures to Facebook fans. The result is a list of the fastest growing artists and the best digital platforms to discover those artists on.

Fastest growing fanbase over the last 6 months:

1. Alabama Shakes
2. Dry The River
3. Lianne La Havas
4. Grimes
5. Bastille
6. Mystery Jets
7. Kids in Glass Houses
8. Mikill Pane
9. The Front Bottoms
10. JD McPherson

Fastest growing artist fanbase this week:

1. Alabama Shakes
2. Grimes
3. The Temper Trap
4. Madeon
5. Dry The River
6. Django Django
7. College
8. Disclosure
9. Lianne La Havas
10. Boy

Fastest growing artists over the last 6 months based on plays online:

1. Princess Chelsea
2. The Temper Trap
3. Grimes
4. Mystery Jets
5. Bastille
6. We Are Scientists
7. Django Django
8. Dillon
9. The Front Bottoms
10. A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Most torrented artists in the line-up:

1. Booka Shade
2. Django Django
3. Com Truise
4. Avalanche City
5. Grimes
6. The Skints
7. Admiral Fallow
8. Willy Mason
9. Eugene McGuinness
10. We Have Band

Most popular discovery platforms for Great Escape artists:

1. Last.fm
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Twitter
5. YouTube

A mix and match approach to all of the above top tens, plus the use of said discovery platforms should ensure a happy, though possibly not healthy Great Escape. Have fun and see you there.

Musicmetric will be at the Great Escape across all three days of the conference. You can contact us when you’re there via Twitter @musicmetric or find us at The Orchard Showcase on Saturday Saturday May 12th from 12pm to 4PM at The Hope on Queens Road.

Last weekend’s biggest headliner in terms of Coachella column inches was undoubtedly Tupac as he was amazingly re-incarnated as a hologram. With the second weekend of music now over, we thought we’d take a look at the social media standings of the Coachella headliners for the whole festival.

Data from Musicmetric shows that across two weekends, all headliners gained greatly in terms of online fans – the biggest spike for most, being across weekend one of Coachella.

When we line them up against each other, we see that Snoop Dogg has made the biggest gains across the week, with a 55% gain in fans, week on week. Tupac comes in second which is not bad at all for a posthumous. The Black Keys and Radiohead grew by much smaller amounts.

Taking a look at plays, with a normalised graph, these stats show that Tupac has the biggest percentage growth and the only obvious spike which tallies with Coachella.

Arguably Britain’s biggest rock group, the Arctic Monkeys – set to play two weekends of the Coachella festival from this weekend – are now bigger in LA than Liverpool.

According to our filesharing data, the success of their current tour of the States and South America is highlighted by their global filesharing figures. The data on the number of filesharers shows that the Arctic Monkeys now have ⅓ more filesharers in LA than in Liverpool.

The data also shows that Chicago in now almost level with Manchester for filesharers of The Monkeys’ music.

The table above clearly highlights that the Arctic Monkeys now count some of both North and South America’s biggest cities in their top ten filesharing locations. When we calculate this as a per capita figure, people in Manchester file-trade the Monkeys’ music ten times as much as those in New York but on an absolute number of fans per city basis, their impact on the USA and South America is huge.

With regards to commercial opportunities for the band including touring and album sales, the absolute figure is more important. If we put the Arctic Monkeys data into context by looking at at the top ten filesharing cities for Noel Gallagher, who is also on a US tour and playing Coachella this weekend the significance of the Arctic Monkeys’ breakthrough becomes even clearer.

Noel Gallagher – top ten filesharing cities:

1. London
2. Glasgow
3. Athens
4. Birmingham
5. Dublin
6. Sheffield
7. Aberdeen
8. Manchester
9. Liverpool
10. Milan

To compile the data, we collect trend data from the BitTorrent network using our own proprietary data collection infrastructure. This connects to the network and monitors the download activity per hour in each city for all music releases being traded on the torrent network. All data is anonymous and aggregated to a city level. As new torrents are added to the network, our platform automatically ingests them into the system and starts tracking them.

Hello fellow South by South West-ers! Musicmetric are here in force during Interactive and Music, so if you want to meet up to talk about P2P, Social Media and Web buzz analytics for the music industry catch us at one of the following locations:

• 10th and 11th March we’re joining partners SoundCloud http://soundcloudopenhouse.com/ in a shared space at 501 East 6th Street, Austin, Texas 7870. From 10am – 6.30pm on both days.
• We’re on a panel ‘Analytics For Musicians’ Thursday, March 15th, 2:45PM – 3:45PM, Austin Convention Center Room 10C
• We are running an official day party where we will be announcing a very exciting new partnership, drinking free cocktails, eating free food and putting on some great bands. It’s called ‘Analytics for Musicians’ Day at Malverde on Friday 16th March from 12pm – 5pm. RSVP here

If you’d like to meet up another time during Interactive or Music then tweet us @Musicmetric or email SxswMeetup@musicmetric.com

Enjoy SXSW !

The Musicmetric team

The Brits winners are notoriously difficult to predict. Since most categories are judged by industry insiders rather than music fans, the usual insights like polls and numbers of Facebook fans don’t give us much indication as to how the voting will go on the night.

That being said, we’ve analysed figures on torrent downloads in an attempt to predict the winners of this year’s Brits.

Figures on filesharing trends are now used widely within the music industry as an early indicator of demand. In the past, the only reliable metric upon which demand was based, was sales figures. Now we have the ability to track numbers of torrent downloads, pinpointing the individual release and geographic location, music industry professionals are able to see the trends emerge before sales, to give an accurate prediction of how well a release will sell.

Ahead of Tuesday’s official ceremony, we have unveiled our list of ‘Pirate Brits’. The list was compiled by looking at the artists and releases most downloaded by filesharers in the UK.

Attending Midem this year? Come along for networking, drinks and to meet the teams from some of the leading companies in music technology.

Register here!

Traditionally ‘ones to watch’ lists have been put together through a combination of tastemakers tips and a level of label marketing. This year, MTV UK & Ireland has taken a different tack, enlisting our help to take fans online response to an artist into account. The search for an unsigned artist ended with Context (formerly Context MC) crowned the winner of the unsigned slot on the MTV Brand New for 2012 list.

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