Below is some info about the BBCs Sound Index, there's some interesting ideas about searching for new music and new work. How do you profile users and what people are searching for and listening to but it still comes down to the most popular, most viewed, most downloaded. After a while does it become narrowed down to music and genres you know you like without finding something unexpected?
The Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now.Print this post
Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public.
As we know which artists are being enjoyed by which people, not only can you can filter the Sound Index to reflect the sites you use the most, or your favourite music styles, you can also tailor it to represent the views of people of different ages and locations.
All the demographic data we collect and use is entirely anonymous, so we can never attribute any age or location data to any specific person. So, if you are a user of any of these sites, you don't need to worry that the Sound Index has any information about you. However, if you are concerned, or want more details, please contact us at soundindex@bbc.co.uk.
You can also watch some of the newest bands hottest new tracks on Sound, the music show on BBC every Saturday.
The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase, with data sources being finalised. During this beta phase we shall also be implementing and tweaking the data currently in the Index, and investigating a weighting system, to allow the more active forms of interaction to contribute more heavily to the Index.
