The other day while browsing through BBC’s dot.life blog I came across a new BBC website – BBC Sound Index. What is unique about this site is that BBC is pooling together music trends from major music sites, social networks, groups, etc. and combining all of this data to compile and come up with the Top 1000 Artists and Tracks. What’s more due to the vibrant and ever-changing nature of the internet this list is updated very frequently and also keeps changing ever so frequently. At the moment of writing this entry, Rihanna is the No. 1 artist with yesterday’s No. 1 artist Coldplay pushed to No. 2. That’s Not My Name by The Ting Tings is the No. 1 track as of this moment. BBC’s Sound Index has massive potential to be the benchmarking tool/site in terms of musical trends since they are effectively pooling resources from all over the internet and summarizing the popular vote in Sound Index. You may be wondering from where does BBC come up with all this information. For starters the “Sound Index crawls every 6 hours or so some of the biggest music sites on the internet like Bebo, MySpace, Last.fm, iTunes, Google, YouTube to just name a few and it pools information from what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging onto. 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.” This is from the Sound Index website and as per BBC.
Sound Index also offers customization wherein you can filter the results to get data only from the sites you frequent and remove other sites you don’t visit. You can also customize data to reflect music popular among certain ages of people and also from specific locations. You can also embed such lists in your blog or website.
Sound Index also has limited profiles of all the artists and in this lists their official website, Wikipedia entry, Last.fm entry, etc. All in all Sound Index looks set to become a major indicator for the latest musical trends and for latest information on artists and music in general. I mean where else can you go and get a listing of the Top 1000 Artists and Tracks all at once. Check out BBC Sound Index for yourself and find out for yourself the current popular music vote and what people around the world are listening to.
