Posts filed under: Music
Looking at song popularity
While digging around the CBC R3Labs data, a question came up - What does it mean for a track to be “popular” on R3?
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find the number of times the top 10% or 20% of tracks are played, but we also thought it would be interesting to compare some of this “popularity” data from the R3 website with that of music site last.fm. We found the comparison to be actually quite interesting, in a geeky/push-the-glasses-back-up-on-nose kinda way.
We looked at plays of the top 100 tracks on both services for a given week, and found that “popularity” is noticeably skewed towards the mega hits on last.fm, in comparison to R3. For example, the most popular track on last.fm accounts for well over twice as many of top 100 plays as its R3 counterpart. Also, the top 20 tracks on last.fm account for almost 40% of the plays of the top 100 songs. This is in contrast to less then 30% for the top 20 on R3. Check out the chart below to see the differences.
While we don’t pretend to know all the reasons for the difference in the popularity curves between these two services, it’s certainly fun to speculate! Perhaps CBC R3 visitors are more exploratory then last.fm users, often venturing out past the obvious tracks on the website. Or maybe Canadian audiences are not as influenced by the massive music marketing machine as the predominately US based last.fm audience. In a perfect world, I would like to imagine that Canada’s history of providing recording and tour grants for artists has helped fuel both the creation of this large back catalog of interesting music, while at the same time, helping build demand.
What do you think is behind difference in “popularity” between R3 and last.fm?
(This is a repost from the R3Labs blog over at CBC R3)
Drummers: always last…
As mentioned earlier, Jer Thorp and I are digging through mountains of CBC Radio3 data looking for interesting tidbits. We noticed that there is a feature of the Radio3 website that lets a band list all their various members and also mark down what instrument/role that member plays. Since bands are able to change the order of the members on the list, I was able to find out what types of musicians list themselves as first, and more importantly, last!
As expected, we were able to confirm that Drummers, always the butt of jokes, were indeed often last on the list, while ego loving, spotlight hogging guitar players typically received top billing.
Check out the graphic for full breakdowns.
Stay tuned for more!
Latest Project: CBC Radio3 Labs
Recently, Jer Thorp and myself have embarked on an exciting new project for CBC Radio3. Entitled R3Labs, we’ve been tasked with sifting through a vast amount of data looking for interesting tidbits, with the goals of the project being to help listeners discover more music, bands to find new fans, and for R3 programmers to identify interesting new listener trends. You can read the official R3Labs introduction on the CBC blog.
The data we have been given access to is very comprehensive! For example, we have data on over 40 million website track plays, going back to 2001 when “indie” still meant something, Last.fm and Gmail didn’t exist yet, and I was still touring with my own band.
One of the first things we did with this data was to geocode all 40 million of the listens, and plot it on a map using Processing. Check it out below:
R3Labs: The R3 40 Million! from blprnt on Vimeo.
I’m going to be doing some regular posts here with updates from this project, so stay tuned!
Bob Lefsetz on Music Careers
Bob Lefsetz is nothing if not controversial. But you just can’t argue with the man, can you? His words have the unmistakable ring of truth. For example, his latest post on careers for musicians is awesome in it’s bluntness and totality - a must read - and is Lefsetz at his best.
Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!
If bands were operating systems
After the recent news regarding Metallica’s prima dona behavior, where they’ve forced bloggers to remove (positive) reviews of their new album, I’ve drafted the following chart to help my fellow geeks understand the lay of the land.
Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)
Pandora takes on the desktop
Pandora has just released a new (Adobe AIR based) desktop client, and it’s pretty cool. Congrats to Tom and the rest of the team!
We’ve always wanted to find a simple way to deliver Pandora as a desktop application — it’s probably been on our to do list longer than any single feature. Today we’re dipping our toe into those waters for the first time with the release of a Beta version of Pandora Desktop.
The Whitburn Project: 25 megs of OCD
Andy Baio has two great posts analyzing the Whitburn Project that will have all music data junkies salivating.
One hit wonders and pop longevity
The Whitburn Project
What is the Whitburn Project? From Andy:
For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.
Hypebot’s “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″
On Hypebot’s blog, there is an interesting post entitled “Top 10 Issues Facing Music 2.0″. Ethan Kaplan astutely observes that these are not so much ‘issues’, but rather a laundry list of virtually untapped possibilities.
Of particular interest to me is “issue number 11“, as is suggested in the comments section of the post: Patronage.
Music patronage is an idea that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about for a number of years, and perhaps its time is coming. There’s certainly a few startups taking a crowdfunding or micro-financing approach to creating music: Sell A Band, Artist Share, and the slightly mysterious, stealth project from Throwing Muses singer, CASH Music, to name a few. An informative round up on these, and other similar services can be found in this great post by Peter Spellman.
As a tangent, I can’t help but contrast historical music patronage (wealthy lords and land owners in a Feudal society hiring court musicians), with modern day licensing deals (Britteny Spears singing for Pepsi). Many individuals have suggested an analogy between the Corporation and the Feudal Estate. Perhaps then, massive, contemporary music licensing deals are simply the inflated version of a very old practice.
SF Music Tech Summit wrap up
The latest SF Music Tech Summit was a total success. Great people, interesting panels, fantastic hallway conversation and free (as in beer) wine. What more could one want?
The panel I moderated was great fun, and we looked at all sorts of technical issues one faces when developing a “music2.0″ site. Tom Conrad had all kinds of great stories about scaling Pandora. Shaun Haber from Warner Bros. did an admirable job filling in for Ethan Kaplan , earning him the dubious nick name “Virtual Ethan”. In the audience, personal hero Derek Sivers told the story of his journey from php to rails, and back again. Paul Lamere took some notes as well, for those interested. All in all, very enjoyable time spent.
There were many great comments floating around throughout the day, but a one that stuck out in my mind was Michael Petricone stating that:
“IP is like chocolate cake. A little can be good, but too much… look out.”
I’ve also been thinking about Tim Westergren from Pandora who suggests that every four piece rock band should get a 5th member whose primary role is to act as blogger, videographer, and online marketing ace, working all the social media sites. Truly good advice, in my opinion.
Corey Denis had an interesting panel on the new music economy, in which part of the panel was devoted to coming up with a new wikipedia entry for the term “new music economy”. Nothing like some panel participation to get things going.
I also had a few good conversations about Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” fiasco with conference attendees, but the best description of the whole ugly mess is written by Mark Pilgram in a post entitled “the day the music died“. It’s a spectacular story of a truly epic fail. There’s many lessons in there - of what *not* to do.
Thanks Brian! Looking forward to next time.