MixedContent

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!