Idolator

The new music-recommendation service Songkick—which sends out e-mail alerts to users when their favorite artists come to town, and uses a last.fm-like recommendation engine to tell its users about "similar artists" being out on tour—has developed a Battle Of The Bands application, which is sort of like Googlefight with the added nebulousness of using data from MySpace (like number of friends and number of song streams added per week) and Amazon. We put it to the test with three artists who have recently made headlines by using the Internet as part of their distribution strategy, and the results may surprise you:

Yes, that's right: An Internet chart that doesn't have Nine Inch Nails as its automatic No. 1. Are we seeing a sea change, or is this just residual bile from the obvious hiccup that the numbers experienced the week before?

Battle of the Bands [Songkick Labs]