Big data makes music

According to a number of news stories, including this in the NY Times, entertainment company 300 has joined forces with Twitter. The partnership will see 300 receive Twitter music data, such as which artists are being tweeted about and – crucially – from where, in exchange for assisting Twitter with organising its data and developing software that could be used by other brands.

A tweet from the company on Sunday said: “Excited to announce our exclusive new partnership with @TwitterMusic – working together on an unconventional approach to artist discovery!”

A number of other companies, including Musicmetric and Next Big Sound also specialise in using social media as a source of data on the music industry. These products all aim to use big data to help the music industry uncover new, exciting acts receiving attention on social media channels.

According to Semetric, owners of Musicmetric, which has recently been updated and is being showcased at the Midem music industry conference in Cannes this week, its product saves time by “automatically analysing performances across billions of fan interactions to produce at-a-glance graphs and summaries.” 

The idea is that this will allow easy analysis of how successful new releases or campaigns have been, and reveal the locations and media channels that have been impacted.