Next Big Sound Status

Data status notices now live directly on Next Big Sound at nextbigsound.com/status. We won’t...

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 16:54:21 -0600

Data status notices now live directly on Next Big Sound at nextbigsound.com/status. We won’t be updating this status blog anymore, but be sure to follow the main Next Big Sound blog on Tumblr if you aren’t already.

Google Analytics

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:05:00 -0600

The amount of data Next Big Sound stores has increased rapidly over the past six months. In order to continue providing a speedy and reliable product for our customers, we’re in the process of completing a transition to our new hosting environment at Rackspace.

As a result of the transition, data from Google Analytics will be unavailable in Next Big Sound Premier between July 10th and July 18th. Aside from this interruption, we don’t anticipate the transition impacting normal usage of Next Big Sound.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

Dropping OurStage Support

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:32:34 -0600

We have stopped supporting OurStage as a network. OurStage fan counts will no longer be visible in graphs and OurStage profiles can no longer be associated to artists. If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to support@nextbigsound.com

Twitter rate limits

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:23:00 -0600

Our rate limit was recently reduced significantly for Twitter API calls. As a result, many artists will not have any twitter data for the past week. We are working with Twitter now to resolve the issue, and will update when we have more information.

UPDATE: We’ve been able to backfill the missing days for many of the twitter profiles in our system, but not 100% of them.

MySpace identifiers

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:08:00 -0600

We no longer support plays and views for any new artist MySpace profiles added to the system. We apologize for the inconvenience and will update when this changes. All of the existing profiles will continue to have counts for both plays and views.

UPDATE: Facebook Insights page likes vs Facebook page likes

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:00:00 -0600

Facebook Page Likes are reported to Next Big Sound two different ways: public Facebook data from their API and through user authenticated Facebook Insights connections. The former includes competitive artists and the latter includes a geographic breakdown.

Page Likes from public data and Insights have similar day-to-day values, but do not always match exactly. For the most part, values trend closely together, but for a handful of time periods there have been large discrepancies. Note that the Facebook Insights data matches exactly what is shown in the Facebook Insights dashboard. This reporting discrepancy is a known bug on Facebook’s end, we will update when more.

YouTube channel views counts below expectation

Mon, 30 May 2011 10:03:00 -0600

On May 27th, we saw an unexpected number of YouTube profiles report zero change in channel views from the previous day. The volume was high enough that we expect it was a lapse in YouTube reporting, rather than the actual view counts for those profiles. As of May 28th, we’ve seen the majority of those profiles reporting again within expected bounds.

UPDATE (6/8/11): We saw many artists report unexpectedly low numbers or zeros over the weekend and beginning of the week as well, but many of the affected artist profiles have since recovered from the down time.

UPDATE (6/29/11): The behavior continues to pop up periodically and then correct itself after a few days. At this point, we are unsure as to whether YouTube is taking any steps to correct the reported view counts.

Vevo drop off

Fri, 27 May 2011 14:44:00 -0600

We saw an inordinate drop off in the play counts for many artists’ vevo channels on May 24th. Most artists appear to have recovered from the drop off, claiming all of the expected plays on May 25th instead, and are back to normal now. We will update when we can explain the anomaly.

Facebook rollups

Tue, 24 May 2011 11:17:00 -0600

At no single time, we’ve observed a strange phenomenon in Facebook fan counts. On, but not limited to, January 23rd and 24th, March 16th-18th, and May 20th and 21st a statistically significant number of artists experienced spikes in their fan counts, suggesting that there was a Facebook specific event that happened, rather than any actual change in fan engagement. At this time, our best guess of the cause of the event is Facebook combining the counts from the various duplicates of artist fan pages in an effort we’ve dubbed page rollups. We will update when more information becomes available.

Facebook Insights drop off

Thu, 05 May 2011 14:14:00 -0600

We’ve seen an unusual drop off in a number of artists’ page likes reported by Facebook Insights on Sunday, May 1st. This drop off was not mirrored by the Facebook page likes that we collect outside of Facebook’s insights engine. We’re currently unaware of the cause of the metric drop, but will update as soon as we know more. Please direct any questions to support@nextbigsound.com.

Vevo Trough & Spike

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:59:00 -0600

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.

JamLegend is Shutting Down

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:06:00 -0600

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.

Dropping iLike Support

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 11:44:00 -0600

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.

MySpace "/music" redirect pages

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:18:00 -0600

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.

Facebook Insights Likes vs Facebook Fans

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:45:00 -0600

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.

Vevo gaps

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:31:00 -0700

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.

Facebook Insights

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:36:00 -0700

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.

New Values

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:27:33 -0700

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.

Facebook Insights

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:52:00 -0700

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.

MySpace Play Counts

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:11:00 -0700

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.