Bbc.co.uk/soundindex - Ranks What's Hot in Music

The good ole BBC has launched a new site indexing the hottest tracks and latest music stars. It’s akin to BillBoard’s rankings, but takes into account the buzz on the nets.

Traditionally, popularity and success was determined by record sales and radio play. Those days have been supplanted by free music, pirating, and dwindling record sales.
The Beeb’s latest venture is called Sound Index. It works like a search engine, trawling the web every six hours to find out what’s hot, what people are writing about, listening to, downloading, and watching. Music blogs and sites like MySpace, iTunes, and YouTube are commonly crawled. The results are displayed on the site cover-flow style. You, the user can filter the Index to reflect the sites you visit most and the songs you like. You can essentially make your own chart suited to your musical tastes.

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“Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public.”

Sound Index is a nifty new way to discover new music, catch up on what’s hot and learn something new. Results are up to date and customizable.

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