Anyone who has been keeping an eye on the Glastonbury 2011 Band Tracker, which the Guardian put together using the Musicmetric API, will have noticed that rather like the top of the Football Premiership, the top 5 has been rendered virtually impenetrable by the big names. Led by Beyoncé, who ‘shall not be moved’ from the number 1 spot, the top 5 also includes Ke$ha, Coldplay, Jessie J and U2.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) claimed the digital album ‘came of age’ last year. According to its statistics, 21m digital albums were sold in 2010, representing 17.5% of all album sales and a growth of 30.6% on 2009’s figures. However, this failed to halt the decline of combined sales of digital and physical albums, which they say fell by 7%. This decline is largely the result of increasing numbers of illegal downloads, which reached record levels and amounted to three-quarters of all downloads last year, according to a study carried out on behalf of the BPI.

One way to discourage music piracy is to use creative marketing strategies to heighten the experience and the enjoyment of acquiring music legally. The Kaiser Chiefs, whose new album The Future Is Medieval was released digitally earlier this month, have done just that.

The other day we made a blog post about Twitter activity per hour for Rage Against The Machine – here is an update, and a comparison to Twitter activity for Joe McElderry.

Who’s going to get the No.1 single this Christmas?

Twitter activity per hour - Rage Against The Machine and Joe McElderry - Click for larger view

If you’ve been reading the news recently, you’ll know that Rage Against The Machine are heading to beat X Factor’s Joe McElderry for the Christmas number one.

Check out the recent activity on Twitter for people tweeting about Rage Against The Machine. The chart below shows number of mentions per hour:

Notice the daily variation due to time zones causing regular peaks when people are awake and tweeting.

Will tomorrows peak be even bigger than today? Sign up for a free musicmetric Essentials demo and find out

Not that relevant to music, but this graph is pretty cool. We ran a really basic text extraction on 11 Million tweets logged by our servers during the past week, and plotted the proportion of messages each day that contain ’ ‘

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