When I was young, new album releases by our favorite artists generated as much excitement as Christmas day amongst my sister and our friends.
Buzz around Peter Gabriel’s 1986 release ‘So’, flowed through the neighborhood, lunch tables, and playgrounds; our social networks of the day.
After school I’d spend hours hanging around the local records shops of Ann Arbor, PJ’s Used Records mostly, chatting with fellow fans while thumbing through albums. ‘Herbie Hancock’s best album is Headhunters’ I’d say. This wasn’t so much a proclamation as it was an effort to impress PJ, hoping my awareness of that album would register me on PJ’s ‘cool meter’… PJ would smile sincerely and say ‘keep coming back, Damian’.
As a music fan today, I’m introduced to new music every week. I have what at times feels like almost personal access to my favorite artists; ranging from scintillating personal thoughts and pictures (Instagram, Twitter) to inspired support of an album’s production (PledgeMusic).
For listening to music, the physical to digital shift has given way to an abundance of platforms from which to discover, purchase, and share music. Chances are that if we met at one of our industry’s many events, we’d end up discussing the variety of streaming services that are available. I’d ask ‘what service do you use?’ to which you may confess no particular allegiance to one, rather, that you use more than one depending on the situation. Many people (including myself) would probably answer this way.
Indeed it is an exciting time to be a fan of music, and I indulge in the chase of discovery for emerging artists amidst the multitude of services. NextBigSound indulges in this chase as well, providing early innovation in this space by analyzing the popularity of an artist across social, streaming, and radio services; later teaming with Billboard to provide their analysis via a new Chart, the Social 50.
In the Film Industry, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have created a synthesized score encompassing rankings and user feedback across streaming video platforms and professional critic reviews. I feel no such thorough metric exists in music.
Across each of the major platforms we have their own in-house ranking; Retail and Radio have Billboard, Spotify and their own popularity ranking, Youtube’s hit count, and so on.
At PJ’s Used Records, when I felt adventurous I’d seek guidance from PJ, and then sneak off to the obscure genre sections he’d recommend to discover something new and exciting. In today’s age, I’d like to have that same sensation by discovering emerging artists within lesser known genres; for example finding the most socially popular Prog Rock band, or, the track play-popularity of Jazz music across YouTube or Spotify.
To accomplish this, the silos of service specific metrics and more widely available social media metrics need to be bridged. A meta-analysis of an artist’s holistic social and play popularity is needed. Such a system would cover artists’ engagement and activity on major social platforms e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook as well as play trends on major play channels e.g. streaming services, music video services and radio. Furthermore such a system would need to be available in real time to provide the richest picture of an artist and a comparison with peers in the same genre and musical style.
Today I’m part of a team that is exploring this new approach for social and track play popularity; a bonding agent pulling together all of the user listening activity across streaming platforms, terrestrial radio plays, and social networks to foster the discovery of emerging artists. We are calling this - MusicGraph Pulse and are hoping this will provide a much needed set of meta-scores and rankings for artists from all genres.
Here is an example of our social and play rankings:
One problem with popularity rankings we are hoping to solve is that often such systems favor only mainstream artists and popular genres. We would like to create rankings that accurately compare independent artists with their peers in the same genre and musical style.
Here is an example of our social and play rankings for the Christian/Gospel genre:
An additional nuance is being able to provide rankings using demographic attributes of the artist in addition to genre - like their country of origin or gender.
Here is an example of social and play rankings for female Electronica artists from the United Kingdom:
As we continue to develop MusicGraph Pulse we will be adding charts showing the biggest movers from a social and play perspective in a given time period and in any given genre to provide a cool way to see who is trending across all social platforms and play services.
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What do you think? I’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts on our evolving music landscape. If you find yourself a bit intrigued with what we’re developing, please contact us if you would like early access to this new data to play with!
Damian Francis is the Director of Sales with Senzari, Responsible for partnership development and licensing of MusicGraph and MovieGraph; API based music, film, and T.V. intelligence and analytics services.