mkshawblog-blog

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Introducing the Music Data Canvas: 25 Years of Music History

We’re excited to unveil a cool little project we’ve been working on with our friends over at Mappr.io. We call the project the Music Data Canvas. The project makes use of a dataset we found published by BullsFrogPond that contains decades of chart topping hits, the number of weeks the songs charted, the years they were released and the corresponding videos on YouTube.

We cleaned and analyzed this data and combined it with YouTube to create a visual interface for exploring the past 25 years of music history and their respective music videos. The data canvas because wanted to find a more interesting way to display our data than the ways music charts are usually displayed. In this case we were  interested in the relationship between the songs beyond just what was on the charts at the same times. The data canvas allows users to visually explore these relationships in ways that are powerful and memorable.

HOW TO USE THE CANVAS

When you first pull up the canvas you’ll see a greeting that explains the project. Click anywhere and that message will disappear to reveal the full data set (see above). Each ‘dot’ represents a song that charted within the last 25 years. Clicking on a song will reveal information about it, including the music video and other raw data.

The three tabs in the upper right will give you access to ‘Snapshots’ which offer different views of the data, a search tab (if you’re looking for a particular artist) and the ‘story’ tab which offers different narratives explaining the data.

Clicking the color dots to the right allow you to reveal all the songs that share a relationship, in this case the year they were released.

The songs colored yellow were all released between 2005 and 2006.

The other way to surface hidden relationships is to simply click on any title. Lines will appear connecting that song to others. The connections are algorithmically generated and are based on how similar the underlying data is (weeks on Billboard Top 10, Billboard Top 40 and Year Released).

The Music Data Canvas is a public resource anyone can use to visually explore music history. If you find something interesting in the data post it to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Vine or Instagram with the hashtag #predpopcanvas to let us know (or email us info@predpop.com). If it’s something truly unique and interesting we’ll send you something awesome as a reward!

VISIT THE PRED POP CANVAS

[mkshawblog-blog]

Music Streaming is Here to Stay

This week streaming internet services like Pandora received some good news from the government. It looks like the heavily debated performance royalties may end up lower than previously expected, much to the chagrin of artist and labels. The Copyright Royalty Board has allowed the webcasters to include a number of negotiated rates as evidence for why the government should lower the statutory rates paid to performers when their music is played online. But this is not all bad for artist… On one hand this will likely reduce money paid to artist (on a per stream basis). On the other hand, this will likely keep streaming services in business, which is good for artist as it is currently the only way artists get paid for people listening to their music on the radio. 

So what are two major takeaways? 

1) Artists need to find new and innovative ways to make money from their music and celebrity.

 2) Streaming music is here to stay (CD’s and radio antennas are on sale at your local thrift shop). 

Cue PredPop now!

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