Archive for November, 2010
Do you have a new, cool music app?
Do you have a new, cool music app? Consider entering it into the SXSW Accelerator at SXSW Music. This accelerator is for applications and technologies specifically designed for the use of musicians and the music business. These companies seek to advance the creation, distribution and promotion of recorded music, to facilitate licensing and payment for use of recordings, or to aid in the booking, logistics and promotion of live performances.
SXSW offers these to 10 reasons to enter your application into the SXSW Accelerator:
1. Expand Your Audience
Thousands of individuals from around the world flock to SXSW each year looking for the next big thing, and SXSW Accelerator is a major part of the excitement. Showcasing your idea at Accelerator is an incredible opportunity to get in front of individuals who can help take your concept to the next level.
2. Network with Industry Leaders
One of the greatest values of SXSW is the amazing mix of industry leaders, technology innovators, big-name companies, fresh startups, and independent talent attracted to the event. The ample socializing opportunities at SXSW Accelerator make it easy for participants to meet, greet, and establish a network of professionals to work with on current and future projects.
3. Refine Your Product
No matter how strong your pitch, to attract investors you need a strong product. Presenting your idea to an experienced panel of industry experts, and discussing your product with other entrepreneurs can help you to take it to the next level.
4. Polish Your Elevator Pitch
Pitching is the single-most important skill you need to rise above the competition. That pitch should be rock solid. At Accelerator, you get to pitch your nascent technologies to scores of innovators, content producers, media experts, and venture capitalists. Their feedback and expertise can help you sharpen that all-important pitch.
5. Learn About Funding Options
Discover the latest funding strategies adopted by startups, including seed combinators, angel investing, coworking, local investors, and more. The company of experts in the industry will prove a valuable source of ideas to finance your product.
6. Music-Related Technology
We’re looking for the newest and best ideas. That’s why we’ve dedicated an entire day of the SXSW Accelerator to focus specifically on Music-Related Technologies at the forefront of the industry.
7. Take Advantage of Media Exposure
SXSW attracts a lot of media attention, and SXSW Accelerator is particularly interesting to press outlets looking to break the next exciting technology story. Accelerator presenters can leverage that attention to place their company in the spotlight with ample press opportunities.
8. Register at the Lowest Rate
Entering your product or service in SXSW Accelerator guarantees you the lowest early registration rate of the year.
9. Experience All That SXSW Has to Offer
SXSW Music offers a wealth of exciting opportunities and events, including panel programming, showcases, and, of course, the inspirational experience that only SXSW can deliver. Be a part of it all and enter your innovative product or service to SXSW Accelerator today.
10. Welcome to Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas has long been a hub for freethinking technology movers and shakers. The Central Texas Hill Country has earned the nickname “Silicon Hills” because of the technology industry giants with major operations here and the scores of trailblazing startups and indie tech companies that call Central Texas home. The ever-changing nature of technology and the inclusiveness of its reach make Austin an ideal place to reach out to the larger social web. Did I mention the BBQ?
LastFM-ArtistTags2007
A few years back I created a data set of social tags from Last.fm. RJ at Last.fm graciously gave permission for me to distribute the dataset for research use. I hosted the dataset on the media server at Sun Labs. However, with the Oracle acquisition, the media server is no longer serving up the data, so I thought I would post the data elsewhere.
The dataset is now available for download here: Lastfm-ArtistTags2007
Here are the details as told in the README file:
The LastFM-ArtistTags2007 Data set
Version 1.0
June 2008
What is this?
This is a set of artist tag data collected from Last.fm using
the Audioscrobbler webservice during the spring of 2007.
The data consists of the raw tag counts for the 100 most
frequently occuring tags that Last.fm listeners have applied
to over 20,000 artists.
An undocumented (and deprecated) option of the audioscrobbler
web service was used to bypass the Last.fm normalization of tag
counts. This data set provides raw tag counts.
Data Format:
The data is formatted one entry per line as follows:
musicbrainz-artist-id<sep>artist-name<sep>tag-name<sep>raw-tag-count
Example:
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>american<sep>14
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>animals<sep>5
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>art punk<sep>21
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>art rock<sep>18
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>atmospheric<sep>4
11eabe0c-2638-4808-92f9-1dbd9c453429<sep>Deerhoof<sep>avantgarde<sep>3
Data Statistics:
Total Lines: 952810
Unique Artists: 20907
Unique Tags: 100784
Total Tags: 7178442
Filtering:
Some minor filtering has been applied to the tag data. Last.fm will
report tag with counts of zero or less on occasion. These tags have
been removed.
Artists with no tags have not been included in this data set.
Of the nearly quarter million artists that were inspected, 20,907
artists had 1 or more tags.
Files:
ArtistTags.dat - the tag data
README.txt - this file
artists.txt - artists ordered by tag count
tags.txt - tags ordered by tag count
License:
The data in LastFM-ArtistTags2007 is distributed with permission of
Last.fm. The data is made available for non-commercial use only under
the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike UK License.
Those interested in using the data or web services in a commercial
context should contact partners at last dot fm. For more information
see http://www.audioscrobbler.net/data/
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Last.fm for providing the access to this tag data via their
web services
Contact:
This data was collected, filtered and by Paul Lamere of The Echo Nest. Send
questions or comments to Paul.Lamere@gmail.com
What’s the TTKP?
Posted by Paul in data, fun, Music, web services on November 9, 2010
Whenever Jennie and I are in the car together, we will listen to the local Top-40 radio station (KISS 108). One top-40 artist that i can recognize reliably is Katy Perry. It seems like we can’t drive very far before we are listening to Teenage Dreams, Firework or California Gurls. That got me wondering what the average Time To Katy Perry (TTKP) was on the station and how it compared to other radio stations. So I fired up my Python interpreter, wrote some code to pull the data from the fabulous YES api and answer this very important question. With the YES API I can get the timestamped song plays for a station for the last 7 days. I gathered this data from WXKS (Kiss 108), did some calculations to come up with this data:
- Total songs played per week: 1,336
- Total unique songs: 184
- Total unique artists: 107
- Average songs per hour: 7
- Number of Katy Perry plays: 76
- Median Time between Katy Perry songs: 1hour 18 minutes
That means the average Time to Katy Perry is about 39 minutes.
Katy Perry is only the fourth most played artist on KISS 108. Here are the stats for the top 10:
| Artist | Plays | Median time between plays |
Average time to next play |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taio Cruz | 84 | 1:07 | 0:34 |
| Rihanna | 80 | 1:27 | 0:44 |
| Usher | 79 | 1:20 | 0:40 |
| Katy Perry | 76 | 1:18 | 0:39 |
| Bruno Mars | 73 | 1:30 | 0:45 |
| Nelly | 56 | 1:44 | 0:52 |
| Mike Posner | 56 | 1:57 | 0:59 |
| Pink | 47 | 2:20 | 1:10 |
| Lady Gaga | 47 | 1:59 | 1:00 |
| Taylor Swift | 41 | 2:17 | 1:09 |
I took a look at some of the other top-40 stations around the country to see which has the lowest TTKP:
| Station | Songs Per Hour | TTKP |
|---|---|---|
| KIIS – LA’s #1 hit music station | 8 | 39 mins |
| WHTZ- New York’s #1 hit music station | 9 | 48 mins |
| WXKS- Boston’s #1 hit music station | 7 | 39 mins |
| WSTR- Atlanta – Always #1 for Today’s Hit Music | 8 | 38 mins |
| KAMP- 97.1 Amp Radio – Los Angeles | 11 | 38 mins |
| KCHZ- 95.7 – The Beat of Kansas City | 11 | 32 mins |
| WFLZ- 93.3 – Tampa Bay’s Hit Music channe | 9 | 39 mins |
| KREV- 92.7 – The Revolution – San Francisco | 11 | 36 mins |
So, no matter where you are, if you have a radio, you can tune into the local top-40 radio station, and you’ll need to wait, on average, only about 40 minutes until a Katy Perry song comes on. Good to know.
