Artist Ranking Through Analysis of On-line Community Comments

Abstract

We describe an approach to measure the popularity of music tracks, albums and artists by analyzing the comments of music listeners in social networking online communities such as MySpace. This measure of popularity appears to be more accurate than the traditional measure based on album sales figures, as demonstrated by our focus group study. We faced many challenges in our attempt to generate a popularity ranking from the user comments on social networking sites, e.g., broken English sentences, comment spam, etc. We discuss the steps we took to overcome these challenges and describe an end to end system for generating a new popularity measure based on online comments, and the experiments performed to evaluate its success.