The Sound Index & Social Music

The Sound Index was the worlds seminal buzz trending chart. Developed for the BBC it captures buzz from social networks, combines this with play and purchase data from online digital media services and ranks music to create a top 1,000 chart of whats hot in music. The chart was a real-time dynamic entity updating every six hours and collecting over 28m data points (e.g. a mention for a track on a social site) in a 48 hour buzz-crawl period. The technology behind the service allows individuals to model and create their own personalised chart and share it with their friends across social sites (e.g. whats hot in HipHop in London for 14 year old boys based on buzz from twitter). The Sound Index was launched in 2008 to critical acclaim in the press and with impressive traffic. Identified as The definitive chart of the internet age by the Guardian and attributed as the seminal buzz trending chart by Wikipedia. Papers were published in ACM, the worlds largest educational and scientific computing society, surrounding the approach and technological breakthroughs. It was not productionised by the BBC; in part due to overspend on web services at the time. Since then we have optimised the technology and are extending it across connected TV, mobile & tablet platforms, creating a multi-device social music initiative. This new social-trending music experience is a cross between Spotify, The Chart Show and the X-Factor, where not only can individuals listen, watch and research whats hot and trending, but they can also publish their own music playlists and vote-up and down what is popular or not. Currently we have engaged with several music broadcasters such as Channel 4 Music, MTV and The Chart Show about a music service and show that spans linear TV, connected TV, mobile, tablet and the web. We are currently looking for the right brand partner as a title sponsor for this service.