State of Online Music 2011

Music industry data analysts Next Big Sound offer up their trends and highlights of last year’s digital music world.

Next Big Sound are a platform that allow artists, managers, marketing professionals, and all kinds of music business-people to monitor a variety of online activity, from video plays to fan comments and more. They strive to provide this data with timely and concise reports and visual representations in order to help artists achieve their goals. In their words, “we believe in the power of data to transform the music industry.”

With all these analytics running 24/7, they were able to publish a report for the entire industry on all activity for 2011, and one which is both succinct and informative. The ‘State of Online Music 2011‘ displays the top artists on various social media platforms, and a daily breakdown of each site’s use. They also compiled a top 50 list across all platforms.

The methodology used to create the charts and lists, consists of four parts, which I will touch on here, but are given more in depth descriptions in the full report. Percent Growth is a direct amount increase in the number of plays or fans over the whole year for all artists recorded. Breakdown by Day shows the average ratio of activity on each given day, across all artists. The Social 50 is a regular list created by Next Big Sound, and created by producing a “composite artist score based on a combination of the metrics in the days leading up to the chart”. VEVO versus YouTube is an important factor in their tallying, and deciding that VEVO is credited with a play when their video is within the YouTube website avoids double counting.

You can view and/or download the full report from here.

by Lee Jarvis.

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Tags: 2011, data, facebook, Next Big Sound, report, social media, Soundcloud, State of Music, twitter, vevo, youtube