This page will give you a feel of where things are in the dashboard and how we refer to them.

Before we start, you might want to head to app.musicmetric.com and sign into the dashboard. If you haven’t set up an account yet, head here.

Basic concepts

Musicmetric is an application that lets you track, compare and contextualise online data on music artists. Musicmetric collect, analyse and present data on the following sources:

• Download activity on BitTorrent
• Fan activity on social networks
• Text based mention on the Web

You can access data for an artist by tracking the artist in your subscription. There is no limit to the number of artists that you can track, and you can remove an artist at any time.

You can navigate the Musicmetric dashboard via the bars at the top and left of the page. The “Artists” button offers an overview of all of your subscribed artists, and you can drill down to detailed metrics on individual artists using the panel on the left:

Musicmetric currently tracks data for 650,000 artists. If data is not immediately available for your artist, it will start feeding into the dashboard after a few days (where available). Not all artists have activity on some metrics, for example, on BitTorrent downloads. Our Musicmetric Lite product does not include any Torrent data and is more suitable for smaller artists who are not being file shared.

Metrics and time series charts

A metric is a particular thing that we measure for an artist. For example, the number of video plays over time, and the number of new fans over time, are both metrics.

Time series charts are line graphs that show how the numbers for a metric change over time, and they are the primary way in which data is displayed in Musicmetric. The time series below shows the total number of social media fans that Rihanna has gained over time:

Our time series charts all share the same toolbars, allowing you to overlay multiple metrics and benchmarks, display either daily or cumulative views, and normalise and export the data.

The table below the graph contains summary data and a colour key. These can be used to hide or remove metrics from the chart.

To the right of the time series is the Events Panel, which corresponds with the Events Ribbon along the bottom of the graph. These allow you to contextualise the changes in your metric with your artist’s real-world actions, such as gigs, TV appearances, release dates, or your own custom events.

Geographic maps

Some metrics are geographic based. Our maps can show a variety of metrics including download locations, fan locations and page view locations, and they all share common toolbars for interaction.

To the right of the map is the Location Panel. This shows the highest-ranking countries and cities for your metric. Below the map you can see the different metrics available. In this example, you can toggle between Twitter fan location and Myspace fan location:

That’s it for the introduction. Now you can start adding some artists to your account.