Our friends at Tumblr are putting on a show today!
It’s fittingly called “Reblog This Concert” and features The Urgency, Bamboo Shoots, Shinobi Ninja, and DJ sets by Bearbot and DJ Machine, all artists that use Tumblr as their home on the web.
Today (August 10th) at NYC’s Gramercy Theatre.
More info and tickets available here.
We’ve been frustrated by a few things about music charts recently. One is the issue of chart integrity, the lines between manipulation & engagement and how to keep such a system honest while rewarding the right people. Another is the terrible quality of most music services powered by Twitter.
Most of them have serious problems. Some don’t reveal the methods or sources in which they’ve gathered their data, just publishing the chart and hoping people would buy it. That prevents the web at large from auditing and finding errors in their methods and work.
Others don’t tell us anything new and don’t account for the social and interactive nature of Twitter, lumping it all together as ‘activity’. So we end up with U2 as the top artist (or Michael Jackson, for the foreseeable future). Finally, the remaining set of tools just implements a file sharing layer on top of Twitter, then allowing others to search for uploaded media.
Given all this, we did what we usually do when there is music/web stuff out there that sucks: we built our own!
Check it out here: Twitter Music Chart
How does it work?
We monitor Twitter for links pointing to tracks on the Hype Machine. We then give each of those tweets a number of points based on the number of followers (and the ratio of friends & followers) that person has. Finally, we add up all the points and figure out which tracks are tweeted by either the most influential twitter users, or by the largest group. Simple.
Just tweet a link to any track on the Hype Machine and it will alter that track’s position in the chart. You can also check your Twitter score on the page to see how many points your tweet would add. Try it!
How is this chart different?
Our interactive Twitter music chart addresses the problems we discussed above. It’s easy to audit as you can see how many points were added by what users and when. It also accounts for the social nature of Twitter by carefully weighing more influential users vs. groups of less influential users. Finally, it presents an easily digestible overview of what’s going on in an interactive way. We welcome everyone tweaking and changing the chart with their tweets – that’s the point!
How is the Twitter user score determined?
We use a formula designed to spotlight tracks tweeted by influential Twitter users as well as those tweeted by groups of people overall. Here is the actual formula:
round(( 1/3 * (twitter_followers / 10) ^ 0.5 ) * (twitter_followers / twitter_friends) * 10))
The follower/friends ratio in this case has a floor of 0.25 and a ceiling of 3.0 to limit certain extremes. We really like the results we’ve been seeing with this approach, but we also know there are many serious math geeks out there. If you have comments on creating a better formula that would better capture the different kind of tweeting activity, let’s chat.
Oh yeah, and one last thing: @hypem will now tweet whenever a new artist or track makes it to the top of any of our popular ranks, so follow us to stay in the loop.
Would love to know what you think!
In just over a week, our post, “On Chart Integrity,” has attracted a ton of attention from bloggers, artists, and magazines. I am excited that we could start such a conversation about music, marketing, and integrity on the web.
To move it in a new direction we’ve removed the list of artists in the earlier post. Even though we’ve made it clear that it was impossible for us to identify the people creating the accounts & favoriting the content (nor was it possible to determine the relationship that those people have with the artists), it was still tempting for some readers to jump to conclusions.
Discussing such conclusions distracted us from the real question. Neil Cartwright, who works with Master Shortie, refocused the conversation by asking: “What is the difference between hype & promotion, when is it marketing or manipulation and where is the balance?“
Judging by the responses we’ve received to our earlier post, there are many answers to this question, some of which we seriously disagree with. We think the answer is simple: make great music and do the right thing. Work with people who will do the same.
Quality is hyperefficient, so much of the marketing will happen on its own. The rest will be about getting your amazing music out there in a way that’s consistent with you and how you work.
Where is that line for you? What is promotion and what’s manipulation?
We’ve recently made some changes to the popular page so that it reflects the number of people who’ve favorited the track in the past three days.
Shortly after we made the change, we were alerted by the Sweet Touch blog about an artist (or their team) potentially altering the charts. We then started reviewing account activity across the entire site and were able to confirm this and find other bands and blogs engaging in similar activity.
We found several artists (or their representatives) and blogs creating numerous accounts on the site and favoriting their tracks to get higher visibility in the charts. Because we’ve only recently switched to a chart based on the number of favorites, their efforts were not fruitful, however. We’ve locked the accounts we found doing this and suspended tracking blogs we’ve detected contributing.
We’ve also taken some extra measures to prevent this in the future. If you have feedback on measures you think will be effective, feel free to write using our contact form. The integrity of what ends up on the Hype Machine is paramount, so we welcome more ideas and constructive criticism.
Finally, here is a list of artists (or their managers, promoters, interns, determined fans, there is no way to ultimately know) who we believe have attempted to alter the charts on the Hype Machine. We thought we’d publish this list to let everyone make their own judgments about quality, integrity and marketing strategies:
[Update 07/07/2009: List of artists removed, see this post for details]
Having reviewed feedback and site activity in the past couple of months, we’ve just published a change to our Popular page.
Here is what’s on the page now:
Popular (default view) – the most favorited tracks from the past 3 days. Once a track is older than 3 days, it will not appear on this list.
Popular Last Week – the most favorited tracks of the previous week.
What changed?
The previous version of the Popular page offered two views: a view based on the number plays & blog post clicks and a view based on the number of favorites. We found that determining popularity by the number of favorites made the process more transparent and easier for everyone to understand — what do you think?