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

In this post we’re going to give a quick fire tour of some charts you can see in our app, demonstrating some of the main functions and how they can be used.

Let’s start off with the big picture. Online Buzz gives an indicator of how many people are talking about an artist on the web. We use clever machines that learn how to cut through the noise and only detect the artist in question.

The chart below shows how the Online Buzz for the band Muse changed since 2006. It shows the number of comments per day about Muse, compared to the overall number of comments about bands.

If we zoom in to the last 6 months as is shown below, we can see the online buzz for Muse has been pretty constant, with a slight increase overall:

If you need a more granular view than Online Buzz, you can check what’s happening on some music social networks in the Social Networks section.

So, below are the MySpace Views and Plays per hour for Muse; the big spike in September shows when they released their single “Uprising”. The peak immediately after that one was the album release:

These charts show a 24 hour moving average for Plays and Views per hour.
That means we take the average number of plays or views for the last 24 hours and plot that on the graph.

This gives a better visualisation of the trend as the raw data can be confusing. Below (in red) we can see what the raw data looks like without the moving average overlaid:

Remember, musicmetric isn’t just limited to superstar bands like Muse. Let’s take a look at some stats for Master Shortie – an up and coming London rapper.

Here is a view of where people follow Master Shortie online:

Looking at some data about those fans, we can see Master Shortie is pretty popular with the ladies:

And their age profile fits a distribution around the 18 year old mark:

Now let’s drill down a bit to see where their MySpace fans live.

The chart below shows that fans of Master Shortie on MySpace are located mainly in the USA and UK:

The overall user demographic of MySpace is pretty biased towards these two countries, so let’s check out the top cities for fans of Master Shortie on Twitter:

Nine of the top 10 cities for locations of fans of Master Shortie on Twitter are in the UK, with only New York showing up for the USA.
Now let’s look at where Master Shortie’s Twitter fans live on a map of the world:

Each one of those circles represents one or more downloads, when you hover over a circle in the musicmetric application with your mouse you can see an instant pop-up of where and how many downloads the circle represents. It even tells you the exact time a download was made.

The darker and more solid the colour, the more downloads are being overlaid onto the same area, giving a really good indication of popularity by region.

Here is the same map for the location of Master Shortie’s fans, this time on MySpace:

Now let’s look at the most influential people relevant to Master Shortie on Twitter.
This will tell you the most relevant people on Twitter to target with marketing material, because they actually care about the artist in question, and are very influential in those circles.

We don’t just calculate this based on the number of followers each person gets, but the number of followers their followers get, and so on.

If that doesn’t make sense, imagine it works a bit like the Google PageRank algorithm, because it does. Someone with a million spam bots following them will have a lower rank than another person who’s only being followed by a few very influential people (like a music magazine or a record label).

Let’s move on to Bittorent data now, and take a look at some charts for Robbie Williams.

The chart below shows the number of peers per hour connected to the torrents for the single Bodies and the new album Reality Killed the Video Star. Just so you know, our Bittorent data is anonymous and aggregated to the city level. Tracking individuals isn’t our game.

And here is the map of locations of people downloading the torrents at 7:00pm yesterday (30th November 2009):

Now prepare yourself for the all time cumulative map for Bittorent downloads of Robbie Williams – Reality Killed the Video Star:

Clearly Robbie is very popular worldwide, so let’s get a closer look below at the largest solid coloured area in the UK and Europe:

To clearly see the top cities, a table is more suitable. Below are the top cities for Robbie Williams – Bodies on Bittorent:

So there you have it!

These were just some of the top functions currently launched in our beta version of musicmetric.

Get ready for our full launch over the next few weeks as we’ll be unveiling a rocking host of extra functions, including twitter activity, results from wider ranging web crawls, sentiment analysis for tracks and artists, more social networks, authority ranking for all sources of data, and individual song tracking.

Plus, we’ll be revealing our advanced analytics functions which allow the whole collection of data to be probed in more detail, picking out patterns, similarities, trends and more.

Our development cycle has been insane and it’s really ramping up now! We’ve hired more full time developers, upgraded our data centre, bought dozens more servers, hundreds of TB of storage… We’re just about ready to explode with data, and we love it.

Keep checking back because the updates will keep coming, and if you just can’t wait then register now to begin tracking everything in real time with a free demo of musicmetric essentials.