Comments on: Twitter’s Most-Chatted-About Artists List: It’s Not As Trent Reznor-Heavy As You Might Think

By: dpn

dpn — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:19:12 +0000

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. :)

By: dpn

dpn — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:46:13 +0000

@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. :)

By: dusty vinyl

dusty vinyl — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:10:31 +0000

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?

By: dpn

dpn — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:24:27 +0000

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

By: ObtuseIntolerant

ObtuseIntolerant — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:19:13 +0000

@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!

By: shawno

shawno — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:41:34 +0000

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.

By: Vulture.Protein

Vulture.Protein — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:48:54 +0000

Twitter is for twits

By: bcapirigi

bcapirigi — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:08:29 +0000

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.

By: perplexingcj

perplexingcj — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:03:03 +0000

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.

By: dusty vinyl

dusty vinyl — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:49:30 +0000

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.