Online music chart website We Are Hunted has released their research for the last half of 2010, showing which artists won the year’s social media battle. Their findings, which measure artists’ “buzzworthiness” over their sales, produced some surprising results.
Oddly enough, British apocalyptic rockers Muse are the most popular band on the internet, which sounds wrong considering Lady Gaga and Kanye West never seemed to leave the public eye last year, and considering Twitter actually had to change its algorithms to stop Justin Bieber from being the top trending subject all day every day. If We Are Hunted’s charts are in any way accurate, how could a band like Muse be the biggest thing online? Well, ReadWriteWeb posed the same question to WAH’s co-founder and CTO Stephen Phillips, who replied, “Because we focus on what people are listening to and talking about, and ignore mainstream press, maybe we are getting a measure of dedicated music fans than the general populace.”
Even so, Phillips agrees that mainstream press does have a lot to do with a new artist gaining buzz. “Pitchfork, Prefix Magazine, NME, Hipster Runoff, Clash Music and Spin can blow up a new artist,” he said in the ReadWriteWeb interview. “If they give coverage, the blogosphere follows.” True, it’s not like those writers at Prefix Magazine ever give that Justin Bieber fellow any coverage.