But wait one second – comparing MySpace plays between Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga shows wildly different popularities between the two artists on that social network:

Lady Gaga and Susan Boyle plays on MySpace - click to expand

Squint really hard and you’ll see a blue line right near the time axis – this represents plays per hour on MySpace for Susan Boyle. For a sense of scale, look at the highlighted values: 144 plays per hour for Susan Boyle and 50,000 plays per hour for Lady Gaga.

Surely this shows some kind of error considering Susan Boyle’s latest success in the UK and US charts? Let’s drill down into some other sources of data to attempt to identify the reason for this difference:

The chart below shows the number of new followers/friends/fans per hour added or lost by Susan Boyle on social networks:

Musicmetric - Susan Boyle friends per hour Facebook - click to expand

At first glance it looks pretty messy, but if you look carefully you’ll notice that the most dynamic of the trends for is Fan Adds on Facebook (green line). Some days she’s getting 14 new fans per hour, but others she’s losing then at the same rate. This gives a clue as to where fans of Susan Boyle are the most active online…Facebook

Now let’s look at where Susan Boyle fans hang out online compared to Lady Gaga:

Lady Gaga & Susan Boyle fans on Social Networks - click to expand

Clearly most of Susan Boyle’s online fans reside on Facebook. Looking at MySpace – If you compare the number of Susan Boyle fans with the number of Lady Gaga fans, it’s obvious that Lady Gaga has way more fans on than Susan Boyle on this particular social network: 2101 MySpace fans for Susan Boyle vs. 911,993 MySpace fans for Lady Gaga. This helps explain the considerable difference between the MySpace play counts for the two artists, and indeed – the ratios of number of fans on MySpace for the two artists and number of plays for them are relatively close:

Susan Boyle MySpace fans = 2012
Lady Gaga MySpace fans = 911,993
RATIO = 450:1

Susan Boyle MySpace plays per hour = 144
Lady Gaga MySpace plays per hour = 50,014
RATIO = 350: 1

Now let’s take a look why Susan Boyle has so few fans on MySpace compared to Lady Gaga by taking a peek at the fan age profile for both artists:

Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga fan ages - click to expand

That above chart clearly shows that the fan age spread for Susan Boyle is considerably wider than that for Lady Gaga (the numbers represent percentage of fans of any given age). This goes some way towards explaining the fact that Susan Boyle has less ‘fans’ on MySpace than would be expected – her fan age demographic is much older than the normal MySpace user demographic and falls more into the demographic for Facebook or older – explaining the larger number of Facebook fans.

Now taking into account the high number of physical sales Susan Boyle has made, one could make the conclusion that since the age demographic for her fans is considerably higher than that of the average social network or streaming music user demographic – it would be fair to assume that most of Susan Boyles fans do not use the social music web to listen to her music, they would rather buy her CD. This is backed up by her low play count on MySpace.

So there we go – these examples demonstrate a good reason why taking stats at face value, without looking at the full picture can give incorrect insight into music trends.

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.