I’ve just been in Groningen in the Netherlands to brainstorm and research Tribemonitor – an online information service to artists and record labels, created by New Music Labs.
The purpose of Tribemonitor is to measure the popularity of music artists based on social media buzz across a range of platforms, rather than on sales or radio airplay.
Measuring online buzz is not a simple thing to do, however. There are some scrapable and publicly accessible pieces of information such as Last.FM plays or numbers of MySpace friends that are obvious and countable. These simple statistical measures that make a good starting point that can act as a basis for artist consultancy (or reassurance): number of MySpace plays, number of artist followers on Twitter, number of YouTube views, etc.
But these metrics only measure what could be described as fan activity, rather than a useful and measurable social score, which would have more to do with the extent to which that artist is being discussed outside of their own sphere of influence. And this is the reason for this intervention.