We will also be presenting real world case studies of Musicmetric Pro demonstrating how it can be useful to you and all levels of the industry. We will also present where and how companies have implemented our API to great effect so don’t miss our presentation on Visionary Monday at 4.00pm in the Innovation Factory.

At our stand we will be having an informal drop in “beers and demo” session on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th from 4pm till 6pm.

We will also have a presence at the Midem hack day so head to the presentations or register to meet the hackers if you want to discuss our API and data feeds.

Or catch us at the Music Tech Meetup @midem for networking and drinks on Sunday evening from 6:30pm to 9:30pm. More info here.

Attending from Musicmetric are:

• Gregory Mead – CEO
• Marie-Alicia Chang – Head of Business development
• Jeremy Silver – Chairman
• Jameel Syed – CTO
• Juliana Obeng – Communications executive
• Ben Fields – API / Data lead (Midem Hacker)

You can find us during the conference at stand MEDIUM 12 but if you want to organise a meeting then drop us an email on midem2012@musicmetric.com.

See you in Cannes!

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.

But one band that has chosen to buck this social media marketing trend in the last year, and as a result has been a little trickier to track, is Manchester 4-piece WU LYF (pronounced ‘Woo Life’). Instead of focusing themselves across the major social networks, they have chosen to cultivate mystery about the band and to maintain a level of anonymity by refusing interviews by the press, and by only releasing a limited amount of information, photos of the band and music via their website. And their website, which is chock-full of semi-religious iconography, evocative imagery and enigmatic text, only serves to heighten curiosity about them.

It soon becomes clear from the website that WU LYF is more than just a band. For those in and around it, it is more like a lifestyle choice – as well as being: a club, a gang and an organisation. In fact, The Lucifer Youth Foundation, from which their acronymic name derives (the first two letters stand for ‘World Unite!’), is actually described on their website as a “not-for-profit organisation”. In order to be a part of it, you need to pay a £15 membership fee (+£3.50 p&p) and adopt a set of disciplines and interests including making art, music and film; and be prepared to indulge in petty crime, money-making and “busting heads”. In return, you will receive, among other things: music, discounted entry to gigs, a statement of intent, and “involvement and a democratic input with all LYF activity”. But don’t worry, if this all seems like a little too much commitment, and a bit dangerous, you can just buy their new album for £9.99.

All this esotericism, and the band’s clandestine activity, has as you can imagine driven the music industry crazy with curiosity, and made them even keener to get a piece of the action. But the band continue to reject much of the attention and to perpetuate the secrecy that surrounds them by operating in the shadows of the sub-culture.

To add further frustration to the music industry, WU LYF’s self-released debut album Go Tell Fire To The Mountain totally lives up to expectation – exceeds it, even. Their song lyrics – all available to read on their website – are abundant with biblical imagery of blood, fire, mountains and caves, and are delivered by the rasping impassioned vocal of front-man Ellery Roberts. And their atmospheric music, which often builds to crescendo, combines church-organ keyboard sounds, Xx-style guitar reverb and syncopated drum rhythms, to entrancing and dramatic effect.

WU LYF have apparently declared they have plan three albums before they disband, so they are definitely one to watch in the coming months as they continue to try to avoid the enticement of the traditional music industry and a conventional path to bigger success. Whatever the outcome, they have already proved that there is more to getting noticed than being active on Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they suddenly make bands operating on these, and other social platforms, seem very unhip indeed.

Despite their elusivity, we at Musicmetric will have find plenty of data to track on WU LYF. We will be monitoring websites that mention the band and their releases, and analysing the sentiment of comments made there. We will also be collecting data from the social networks frequented by their fans, as well as, P2P networks used to trade their music.

So why not follow the effect of this ‘mystery’ marketing strategy by adding WU LYF to the artists you follow on the Musicmetric App?

Toby Burton

These methods are applicable to any text based data, but for this example we’ll take a look at Twitter.

Musicmetric collects all mentions of an artist on Twitter. Taking an example of the rock band Oasis, we collects tweets in the following 3 categories:

• name mentions: “Oasis”
• replies: “@Oasis”
• retweets: “RT @Oasis”

If the artist does not have a twitter ID, we still track their name mentions – and we are currently tracking over 500,000 artists.

It is obvious that all replies and retweets are definitely relevant to the band but some name mentions are probably not. When people post a tweet which includes the word “Oasis”, they might mean Oasis rock band, an isolated area of vegetation and water in a desert or just a name of a random bar or restaurant. Therefore it would be naive to collect tweets without filtering them because this trend data would not reflect the real popularity of the band Oasis on Twitter.

These name mentions are important since a lot of the time people will not cite the @username of the artist when referring to them on twitter (as can be seen in the examples below) and of course, not all bands even have a twitter ID.

At musicmetric, we have developed proprietary algorithms to deal with irrelevant tweets effectively. We analyse all tweets and successfully filter out irrelevant messages by assigning a probability that the tweet is relevant to that particular artist.

The table below shows a good example of our algorithm’s efficiency:

Even though there are still few irrelevant tweets (highlighted red) and some vague tweets which we can not tell whether they are relevant or not (highlighted blue), the accuracy has been improved a lot in comparison to the raw data. Currently for bands or artists who have very common names like Oasis, our model can filter up to 70%-80% of irrelevant tweets. For bands or artists who have distinct names like Lady Gaga or Robbie Williams, the model can filter up to 95%-100% of irrelevant tweets.

The chart below shows the number of tweets mentioning Oasis per hour before and after being filtered. You can see a big difference and that is why the filter is very important.

We are still collecting more data and adding more valuable information to our model. Therefore it is expected to work more and more accurately – it learns as it goes, and it can read 96 Million tweets per day, so it learns very quickly.

Why not check some live stats for your bands by registering for a musicmetric Essentials trial?

Trung

It’s been corrected for varying popularity of twitter on different days.

Saturday is a happy day, and it’s tomorrow – so cheer up!

I should mention, our sentiment analysis algorithms at musicmetric are rather more advanced than this

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.

This is a screen shot of the analytics available in the musicmetric application.

We’re giving away 250 voucher codes for TechCrunch readers to register for a 1 month free trial of Essentials, with some sneak previews of Professional added in, so get registering !

It’s not just superstar artists like Lady Gaga who we track – why not check out a demo of musicmetric Essentials and see the stats for the 500,000+ artists we’re currently tracking !