Vevo was unable to retrieve data from the YouTube API for several channels due to some changes in the YouTube API’s system.  Those channels have been unable to aggregate the YouTube counts each day, making the totals for those artists seem to stagnate starting somewhere in the second to last week of March.  In the past week, we’ve seen those channels update their total play counts to the expected amounts and resume normal behavior, but the changes are rolling.  When those channels resume, the delta for that day will be an unusually high spike as all of the counts that would have come in over the lapsed period show up in a single day.

Posted April 21, 2011

On April 18th, JamLegend will stop accepting new registrations, on April 29th, the site will shut down entirely (http://blog.jamlegend.com/jamlegend-is-shutting-down).

At the end of this month, we will also be removing JamLegend as one of our supported networks.  If you have any questions about this update, please direct them to support@nextbigsound.com.

Posted April 21, 2011

Since iLike hasn’t updated their data in several weeks, we are disabling the profiles across Next Big Sound.  If you have any questions about this update, please send them to support@nextbigsound.com.

Posted April 14, 2011

Some artists with MySpace profile pages that redirect automatically to “myspace.com/<USERNAME>/music” have experienced incorrect play counts over the last few weeks. We are currently looking into solutions with MySpace and advise to approach this data with caution as play counts may be exaggerated in some cases.

Update 4/6: The crawlers have been updated to account for the “/music” redirect pages.

Posted March 30, 2011

Due to differences in collection time of Facebook fan page data between the Facebook Insights engine and our own, Facebook Insights new fan counts can lag a day behind our counts for some artists.

Posted March 24, 2011

Some Vevo videos have missing days.  The reason for this is that there is a limit of 32 videos on each page of a channel, and we previously weren’t crawling every page on a channel for data.  The addition of new videos can push older ones onto new pages, so we would have stopped receiving data for videos that got pushed back.  This problem has been rectified, but we are unable to fill in the historic data at this time.

Posted March 8, 2011

Data from Facebook Insights stopped reporting on February 24th for a subset of metrics including Pageviews and Engagements. The bug appears to be related to the previous issue we experienced with with Facebook Insights.  

Facebook has an open bug ticket for the issue and we’ll update our status blog when the feed has resumed. 

Update 3/3: Facebook Insights continues not to update. The outage impacts all metrics from Facebook Insights. 

Update 3/5: Facebook Insights has resumed updating. 

Posted February 28, 2011

Most of the social media metrics that we crawl day to day come in as totals. This means that we need to have a consistent convention for establishing whether the difference (new fans, plays, or views) between the totals on day 1 and day 2 should be displayed on day 1 or day 2.  

For instance, Facebook fans come into the system as the total number of likes that a fan page has on any given day. So if on day 1, a page has 300 likes, and on day 2, the same page has 350, the Next Big Sound convention is to display the difference, or “delta” as happening on day 1. So on the graphs you’d see that as day 1: 50 new fans. We choose to do it this way because the cumulative values tend to be pulled in the mornings of each day.

There was previously a bug in the graphs causing that convention to instead display the day to day changes as happening on the later day, instead of on the earlier. We have since corrected the problem and apologize for any inconvenience the discrepancy may have caused.

Posted February 23, 2011

We’ve noticed that data from Facebook Insights has stopped reporting since February 16th for all Premier customers.  This appears to be an issue across Facebook, as there is an open bug ticket for the problem:

http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=15380

We will update our status blog when the feed has resumed.

UPDATE: Facebook Insights are back.

Posted February 22, 2011

For an unknown reason many artists on MySpace experienced a spike in play counts on February 16, 2011. We’re investigating the situation.

UPDATE: MySpace confirmed that there was an issue with the front end counters that caused a massive spike for a large number of artists. We are looking into a correction.

Posted February 17, 2011