The microblogging service Twitter has really taken off this week, thanks in large part to its ability to both refract the narcissistic impulses of the famous and allow anyone with an e-mail address to act Just Like The Stars. Sometimes, though, it is actually sort of useful! The music-chatter-charting site We Are Hunted released what it’s saying is a list of yesterday’s 85 most-mentioned artists on the 140-character-limited service, and what’s probably most surprising is its middle-of-the-roadness–Taylor Swift, who’s an avid Tweeter herself, tops the chart, and mainstreamy artists like Lady GaGa, Mariah Carey, and Britney Spears are all in the top 10 while Nine Inch Nails (No. 19) and Radiohead (No. 17) have to do with only making the top 20. Oh no, the not-cool people are taking over the Web! Guess it’s time to go back to BBSes.
1. Taylor Swift
2. Pink
3. Lady GaGa
4. Mariah Carey
5. Beatles
6. Queen
7. Britney Spears
8. Kings of Leon
9. Aerosmith
10. Coldplay
11. Kanye West
12. Kiss
13. Miley Cyrus
14. Lil’ Wayne
15. Prince
16. Demi Lovato
17. Radiohead
18. Depeche Mode
19. Nine Inch Nails
20. Pink Floyd
21. Eminem
22. John Mayer
23. New Kids On The Block
24. Jonas Brothers
25. McFly
26. The Cure
27. Taking Back Sunday
28. Drake
29. Bob Dylan
30. Bruce Springsteen
31. Silverstein
32. Green Day
33. Jason Mraz
34. Metallica
35. Keri Hilson
36. The Killers
37. Paramore
38. David Bowie
39. Lily Allen
40. Black Sabbath
41. Led Zeppelin
42. Madonna
43. Frank Sinatra
44. Pussycat Dolls
45. Celine Dion
46. Morbid Angel
47. Kelly Clarkson
48. Rolling Stones
49. Jay-Z
50. Ciara
51. Fall Out Boy
52. MGMT
53. Kid Cudi
54. Nelly
55. Jimi Hendrix
56. Death Cab for Cutie
57. Bon Jovi
58. Jack Johnson
59. Linkin Park
60. The Doors
61. Billy Idol
62. Bob Marley
63. Jimi Hendrix
64. Asher Roth
65. Black Eyed Peas
66. Nirvana
67. Hannah Montana
68. Cat Stevens
69. Mansun
70. The Jonas Brothers
71. Dave Matthews
72. Katy Perry
73. Rihanna
74. AC/DC
75. Dido
76. Oasis
77. Lloyd Cole
78. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
79. The Fray
80. Ne-Yo
81. Justin Timberlake
82. Pearl Jam
83. Jeff Beck
84. The Smiths
85. Prodigy
One caveat: I do wonder if one-word artists like “Pink” and “Queen” and “Kiss” and “Prince”–all of whom rank pretty highly–are seeing their totals inflated at least a little bit because of their, y’know, resemblance to actual words.
we are hunted, minimalist music aggregator [elbo.ws/vanilla]
I knew all my tweeting about Aerosmith would make a difference.
Mansun at #69??? Don’t get me wrong, I think Attack of the Grey Lantern is one of the best British albums of the 90s, and its follow-up, Six, is an engrossing, underrated gem, but who’s spending all this time tweeting about them in 2009?
Whenever I see something like this I always suspect it’s some sort of PR-driven exercise. Include some obscure artists, include some poppier than pop artists and hey presto you get publicity across a range of websites driving traffic to your site. The information doesn’t even have to be accurate as long as you get those hits.
For instance, taking Thierry’s example of Mansun which is at #69. A cursory check reveals they have been mentioned 57 times in the last seven days on Twitter.
A quick check for Akon who doesn’t make their top 85 list reveals over 670 tweets in the last 24 hours.
As such I’m sure there’s myriads of examples of artists missing.
70. The Jonas Brothers
24. Jonas Brothers
It seems odd that there would be that big of a gap between people who refer to them with or without the “the”.
This doesn’t address the context in which these artists are being mentioned. I don’t like Taylor Swift at all… crap, I just mentioned her again. In fairness, I don’t see anything here claiming that all these “mentions” have positive connotations attached.
This list says more to me about the crowd using Twitter than what my peers, or people in general, are listening to.
The only two reasons I like Twitter–Solange and Kristin Hersh–aren’t on there, either. Which is sad, even if it is a fact. It’s a sad fact.
Twitter is for twits
I’m also a bit suspicious about the high ranking of Pink. I mean, I’ve got nothing against her. But “pink” seems likely to be a word that many people would post without any connection to the artist.
And I guess my recent Twitter posts about Neko Case and Morrissey weren’t enough to get them on the list. No surprise, I guess.
@shawno: Hey, I’ve been tweeting about Neko Case, but to no great effect either. Also Wilco.
I also tweet about the Jonas Brothers a lot…
Along with other people who do without actually saying “(the) Jonas Brothers” over and over…anyway just to answer your question I subscribe to a search feed of that term (for blogging purposes) and I’d say positive and negative usage runs about 70-30. :P
Just as an aside - Demi Lovato is a brilliant tweeter - a perfect credit to her age and well-adjustedness (she is so much more 21st century Annette than amusing-but-bratty Miley) and I just want to go on record as saying that Taylor Swift is the BANE of my (is it just me?) existence.
And I’m surprised to see Cat Stevens!
Hello. :)
Gone are the days of twitter being a very trendy bunch of people with interesting tastes in music… sad but true of any app like it.
If we were just going a keyword match for the word Pink it’d probably be right at the top! Fortunately we aren’t… we actually keep a fairly rich representation of an artist, and we don’t just look out for them, we actually want to know that people are listening to them (or talking about listening to them at least).
Sentiment is another aspect of the wearehunted platform that effects how data is processed in the system. For specific sentiment you can check out a page like http://wearehunted.com/music/news/pink/ and look at the bottom graph under “Volume and Sentiment” - the bottom line is positive sentiment, the top one is negative.
We are working very actively on the site, and welcome any feedback. :)
Oh yeah, for what it’s worth Neko Case is making her way up some of our twitter and non-twitter data, a very strong indie performer. :) http://wearehunted.com/music/news/Neko_Case/
David @ wearehunted.com
http://twitter.com/dpn
Thanks for the feedback dpn, but your reply doesn’t really explain why a band like Mansun with very few mentions over the week appear on your Twitter chart yet many other acts with far more mentions don’t. A problem with the way you are aggregating your data?
@dusty vinyl: Indeed. We are actually taking your comments quite seriously and trying to track down how that happened. The twitter data is collected using a different method that a lot of the other data in the system, so you could well have uncovered something for us.
As Stephen said when he originally posted the data, there could be some outliers in there.
Thanks again for your interest. :)
I thought I’d bring some closure to this… it turns out that search.twitter.com doesn’t display all results for your query when they are more an than hour old. So your search for mansun didn’t display many results, when there actually had been lots of mentions. But.. often there are noisy people on twitter who essentially spam certain artist names, like when they have itunes hooked up to twitter or something like that. We’ve got our protection in place for this kind of spam too. (for a while there Venetian Snares was number two in the twitter chart!)
Hope that clears it up for you. :)