Once again those good people at the Guardian have utilised the Musicmetric API, this time to create a Band Tracker showing the day on day change in activity across the social networks of acts playing at last weekend’s Hop Farm Festival in Kent.

Hop Farm promotes itself as an independently run festival that is sponsorship and branding free. You may recall that Neil Young [click the link to see the Fantracker stats page] headlined its inaugural event in 2008, but in 2009 it failed to capitalise on this success with a middle of the road indie-rock line-up. Last year Bob Dylan made his only UK performance of 2010 at the festival, and the supporting bill benefited from a consistent folk-bias including breakthrough artists of that year Seasick Steve and Mumford & Sons.

This year’s bill of headliners was certainly something of a coup for festival promoter Vince Power, who secured three legendary acts: The Eagles, Prince and Morrissey. Other rock legends appearing over the weekend included Bryan Ferry, Iggy & The Stooges, Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

The most contemporary of the sub-headlining acts this year was 22-year-old double-Brit award winner, Tinie Tempah, and it was he who kept the veterans of rock and pop off the top the Hop Farm Band Tracker chart over the festival weekend. Following the success of the biggest show of his career on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, and his appearance at the Wireless Festival in London’s Hyde Park, at Hop Farm Tinie was main support to Prince who was playing his first show in the UK since his record-breaking 21-nights at London’s O2 Arena in 2007.

Looking at some unexpected artists who have been powering their way up the charts, we noticed that there were some truly interesting things happening with their online data.

LMFAO

First up is American electro hop duo, LMFAO, who have soared to fame after their song ‘Party Rock Anthem’ stormed the charts, gaining them a number 2 position. ‘Party Rock Anthem’ is the first single to be taken from their sophomore album, Sorry For Party Rocking, so we’re going to try and predict whether LMFAO are going to be a flash in the pan, or the new Lady Gaga.

Today we are going to introduce to you another piece of technology we have developed at Musicmetric. As you may know, parts of our product are driven by semantic analysis; we don’t just tell you how many people are talking about your artists, but also their opinions, the sentiment and common topics surrounding them. How do we do this? Sentiment analysis is a challenging problem that still has not been solved completely. Many so-called sentiment analysis systems use a very naive method to detect sentiment in a context, i.e. using key words or very basic sentence decomposition. However, human language is not that simple, so these approaches fail to capture irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions.