This weekend are two of the biggest conferences in the music biz: the (NARM) Convention in Chicago and the SF Music Tech Summit in SF Music Tech Summit. RockDex will be at both, and we'd love to connect with you.

Thanks very much to the good folks at NARM for featuring RockDex on their website several days in a row! We are honored to be new members of their wonderful organization.

Jimmy and Shannon will be at the Chicago Hilton for NARM Friday through Monday, though on Sunday, Shannon will be traveling to SF (see below).

On Monday, May 17, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at NARM, Jimmy will talk RockDex in a series of product presentations under the banner, "Online Metrics and Measuring Success." As the NARM site explains: These days, the artist’s brand success is measured by so much more than CD and concert sales. In this series, metrics service providers will provide a look at the new online and mobile metrics tools they provide to help labels take a fuller measure of their marketing and branding efforts, and consumer responses to them.

Meanwhile, in San Fran, also on Monday, Shannon will participate in a panel discussion on on measuring data and using it to drive conversation and forge stronger relationships with fans. The panel will be held at 9:20 a.m. in the Osaka Room of the Hotel Kabuki, where the Summit is being held. Check out the schedule here.

If you'd like to connect with Jimmy or Shannon at either NARM or SF Music Tech, hit them up via e-mail: jimmy@rockdex.com, shannon@rockdex.com. You can also reach out on Twitter: @jimmywinter or @rockdex.

Big things are in store for RockDex -- and, we truly believe, the music business, period. Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch!

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Raise your tweeting hand if you think it's more fun to watch TV with your friends.

You're not alone. The Nielsen Company's latest Three Screen Report shows that simultaneous Internet use and TV-watching has increased by 35% over last year.

That means that while the boob tube's on, chances are you're turning to one of those other two screens -- your computer or mobile phone -- to talk about what you're watching with your friends on social media.

For bands and musicians that break into TV placement, this is huge. Just ask MGMT.

When the Brooklyn band played Saturday Night Live on April 24, so many folks took to the Twittercooler that MGMT apparently became a "trending topic," signifying that "MGMT" was one of the top ten terms of the moment on Twitter. For those not in the know: the trending topic index (look for "Trending: Worldwide" over on the right margin when you log in to Twitter) is a list that's usually reserved for things like #nowplaying, #MusicMonday and Justin Bieber.

Needless to say, RockDex caught a ton of tweets about MGMT during and after the band's SNL performance. Here's a sample from our Twitter data showing individual tweets a few minutes after midnight EST. Quite a few fans took time to celebrate the sudden arrival of one of their favorite non-super-famous bands in the list of trending topics.

Roots drummer and card-carrying Twitterato @Questlove fired off this underhanded compliment.

As for individual three-screeners watching MGMT's performance, the reaction was mixed. For example, @cynicalmatt and @JessStevesie voiced differing perspectives, to say the least.

You don't have to read through the tens of thousands of tweets to get the gist of the story: Fans of MGMT voiced their love, and critics barked. Obviously, it's great for any band of MGMT's stature to have legions of people talking about their TV performance on their second and third screens.

When it comes to televised events, social media amplifies the impact. Look at the Super Bowl overloading Twitter this past Feb. 7, or how people dissected every speech of the Oscars via tweet and stoked discussions on Facebook.

But if you look closer at the MGMT SNL discussion, something a bit deeper comes to light -- namely, how the true fans stuck around to defend their favorite band. And reported to their friends who missed it.

The Twitter reaction to MGMT's SNL spot gives a deeper -- and, for the band, reassuring -- picture in real-time of fan reaction to the new album. If you haven't heard the album or read the mostly lukewarm critic reviews, MGMT's new one, Congratulations, is a noisy, spiky, art-rock departure from the group's 2007, pop-inflected breakthrough, Oracular Spectacular.

While many casual fans have been put off by the absence of summery, ride-around-with-the-top-down jams like "Electric Feel" and "Time to Pretend," real fans are not only proclaiming their love but are taking the time to defend MGMT against detractors.

It's also possible that the band, to some degree, has trained fans to talk about them on Twitter. In March, the group (or its own mgmt.) ran a campaign through @whereisMGMT involving a real-world capture-the-flag game. The account drew more than 8,000 followers. The group's apparent official account, @whoisMGMT, doesn't seem to have taken off yet, despite having nearly 20K followers waiting for the content. It's not always easy to get rockers to tweet for themselves, alas...

Now it's your turn. What do you think of the band's polarizing SNL showing? Let us know: @RockDex.

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At RockDex, we're always looking for new ways to put the social media data we gather to practical use.

Usually, we examine how things like 1200 tweets on the day a track leaks or 800 Facebook fans the day the tour's announced can be used to determine the effectiveness of marketing strategies and the like. But we haven't yet looked at how RockDex could be used by a member of the press whose job is to cover localized events. And in a recent conversation with a friend of ours at a newspaper, we were issued a challenge. As a former music editor at an altweekly, I jumped at it.

The Challenge: Show a midwestern music journalist how RockDex could be used to capture Twitter stats around a concert that happened over the weekend.

The Concert: The Flaming Lips at Sandstone Amphitheatre, Bonner Springs, KS, April 23, 2010.

Looking at the Flaming Lips Twitter Quick Stats, I saw that on April 23, the band got 199 tweets. The following day, they got 123.

Note: When looking for tweets around a specific event, particularly a late-evening concert, it's important to check both the day of and the day after the show, to catch tweets that come in after midnight. (Side note: that spike of 400+ tweets on April 15? Likely due to the Lips being announced to the Glastonbury festival lineup.)

Did she say they came out of a vagina? Awesome.

Links to those twitpics: 1, 2

Those are just some of the more interesting samples. All in all, I found about two dozen tweets from late 4/23 through early 4/24 containing content from or about the show. If you really wanna rock some data, here's a PDF displaying all the Flaming Lips tweets RockDex captured between right before the Lips went on stage through the wee small hours, when fans were still talking about the mindblowing performance they've just seen. (I manually highlighted the local tweets in gray.)

Though nothing really surprising happened at this show -- no unexpected fireballs or nudity -- if anything crazy had happened, chances are you would've been able to find first-hand accounts on Twitter.

Now, you could argue that it's possible to get the same data from Twitter search. It is, but only if you do the search manually, sifting back through hours and hours of tweets in real-time. Go to a Friday night show and wait until Sunday to write it, and you've got to dig back through days of tweets. Not fun.

This data also provides a journalist covering music at a newspaper great networking and community-building opportunities. You can find people in the community who, like you, are going to shows and talking about it on social media. Don't they deserve a follow?

Man, I wish I'd had RockDex when I was at the newspaper.

Challenge: Completed.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_putnam/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

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If only everyone loved fun, Chromeo would be king.

The New York-via-Montreal duo has been reimagining '80s disco-funk for a pop-craving modern crowd since 2004, but it was 2007's Fancy Footwork (Vice) that set the group's status as sui generis synth maestros.

Now, with the band's announcement last week of its much-anticipated followup to Footwork, Chromeo's cork is set to pop.

Photo: Angela Boatwright

Using RockDex, we can gauge how much of an impact the announcement of the forthcoming album, Business Casual (out August 17), registered on the social web.

Like many bands that appeal to the indie-blogger demographic, Chromeo counted on Pitchfork to get the buzz going.

Following Pitchfork's April 15 late-afternoon post about Business Casual, fans responded by driving mentions of Chromeo on Twitter into the 200 range over the ensuing 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Chromeo took to their own Facebook page to announce the news -- or rather, repost the P-fork link -- generating (at last count) 153 likes and 46 comments.

In fact, if you increase RockDex's date range to the beginning of the year, you'll see that Chromeo's MySpace views have declined in recent months, from a huge spike at the beginning of January, down to the low thousands.

Meanwhile, iLike has been paying off for Chromeo, logging, on average, 81 fans per day.

ILike, too, should not be ignored, especially since MySpace's purchasing of the platform seems to be coinciding with MySpace's own decline.

One very awesome thing that didn't register on MySpace: Chromeo's appearance on Darryl Hall's amazing web series Live From Darryl's House.

Watch the ultimate rec-room performance of the Hall & Oates classic "No Can Do" as you contemplate which of your white suits you'll wear when Business Casual comes out August 17.

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What unsigned artist wouldn't kill to have 1.4 million Twitter followers?

As the old channels die out, social media is where music fans are gathering. Yet musical artists who aren't celebrities have little choice but to grow their online fanbases much in the same way that they build audiences on tour: by working hard, being there and showing individual fans that they value their support on a personal level.

Photo by Lane Hartwell

The story is no different for Zoe Keating. The classically trained, experimental cellist even has it a bit tougher, given her chosen medium: one-woman instrumental composition with cello and computerized loops.

Yet here she sits with 1,377,141 Twitter followers and counting. (Interesting fact: She gained around 40,000 followers since I began writing this blog last night.) And that massive follower base was arrived at in large part by luck.

The big questions: Has that follower base made @ZoeCello an Internet celebrity? Kind of. It's gotten her some media attention, at least. Has it made her rich or prompted her to rest on her laurels? Nope and nope.

"I don't like to get wrapped up in the numbers and stuff," Keating tells RockDex over the phone from her house north of San Francisco. "I like to be me and to do things naturally and organically. Ultimately, I'm not a marketer, I'm a musician."

We first got a glimpse of Keating's damn-the-numbers approach to fanbase building last week. Following a blog post in which we crunched some of her social media numbers, Keating set us straight that it's personal interaction, not web traffic, that she cares about more.

First, she shared her feelings on MySpace, which is one of the sites we at RockDex monitor for artists:

Naturally, we wanted to talk to her. Tracking numbers and data is of course a big part of what we do at RockDex, but it's not all we care about, either. Numbers are important, but musicians aren't factories churning out products. They're artists with lives and personalities.

But first, seriously, how does an unsigned classical musician get a million followers on Twitter?

Zoe knows that were it not for the people at Twitter appointing her unbidden to the suggested users list (the list of prominent users that Twitter automatically suggests to anyone who sets up a new account), she wouldn't have gained so many followers so fast.

However, it was her early adoption of the platform that presumably influenced the Twitter-powers-that-be to name her a suggested user.

A former information architect for a tech company in San Francisco during the dotcom boom and then later for the Research Libraries Group, Zoe began using Twitter as a way to track tech news. At first, she says, it had nothing to do with her music. Then, as social networking sites began to prove more useful to musicians, she was among the first to take advantage.

"I've just been doing this for a long time," she explains. "Before Twitter, there was MySpace, and I was one of the first to sign up on MySpace before it started allowing music accounts. … So I've just always been doing this stuff. It was a gradual process. My career has taken years -- that was the secret that wasn't a secret."

Despite the boost of being on the suggested user list, Keating prefers gradual growth over numbers-oriented campaigns.

"I don't believe in the marketing push. For an artist just starting out, having that marketing push to make a big splash won't be very long-lasting. My strategy is to get the person next door interested, and the person next door might get their friends interested. I'm in this for my career, not just a one-off thing."

Still, she's not afraid to try new things.

Earlier this month, mainly as an experiment, Keating offered up a free song from her upcoming album, Into the Trees, to fans in exchange for a tweet.

After researching platforms that would've charged her to build the tweet-for-mp3 mechanism, Zoe plied her tech savvy and did it herself using Twitter OAuth, with help from her friend Jesse von Doom of Cashmusic.org. She even created a custom bit.ly link to track the experiment. As RockDex showed, hundreds of fans responded.

"It's a really valuable medium as a way to express myself, and I don't want to mess with that," she continues. "One of things about Twitter that's good for me is it allows people to see me as a three-dimensional person."

She knows that of her 1.4m followers, the percentage of people who go from being casual @ZoeCello followers to true Zoe Keating fans is small, but she's not going to stop tweeting anytime soon.

"I feel like I'm not actively trying to convert people to be my fans. However, I feel like it's an opportunity to have a broader audience. It's up to me to convince them that I'm worth their time. I feel strongly that by being myself, I can make that happen. It's still the chance to have an audience that I wouldn't have had before," she says.

"Instead of shouting into an empty room, I'm shouting at a huge party. If in that huge party, only one person hears, I'll take that one."

At RockDex, we make no bones about our biz: We do track data, sure. But bigger than that is our mission to empower artists like Zoe with the ability to use their social media data to make business decisions. (By the way, Zoe hadn't heard of RockDex until that initial blog and is not currently a customer.) And as we build and improve our platform, we continually strive to marry the quantitative with the qualitative.

Because even if you do have the numbers -- or don't -- it won't do you much good without possessing that element Zoe Keating has consistently defined. Being real.

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We live in a time of ADD mass music consumption. Bands are hot one day and forgotten the next. It is a cruel, fickle age -- one in which you'll hear some callow youth dismissing a once-loved band by saying, "They were so '09." So what is to become of the buzz band that dares to take its foot off the PR pedal for an extended period of time (we're talking, like, a year)?

Well, the good news is that bands that reach a certain point of success can count on a bit of, shall we say, social capital when it comes to their fanbase.

Take Wolf Parade. The Sub Pop act that was all the rage in '05 (scoring a 9.2 on Pitchfork for its debut) and then howled again in '08, went on hiatus while members pursued side projects.

Now, the lupine march is on again, and judging by the group's social-media traffic, the true fans haven't forgotten Wolf Parade.

On April 2, ol' love-'em-and-leave-'em-and-love-'em Pitchfork ran an interview with Wolf Parade's Dan Boecker to announce the new album, Expo '86, along with news of a world tour.

Evidently, it was the tour that made the biggest ripple on RockDex's Twitter tracking for Wolf Parade. On the 2nd, tweets shot up from the low double-digits to 366 in one day.

Two tour dates in particular spread across Twitter like rabies: (1) a show at Port City Music Hall in Portland, ME, and (2) the Pitchfork Music Fest.

RockDex's patented Wolf-Seeker™Tracking Device* has the evidence:

Immediately after tweeting back to the fore, Wolf Parade played its first shows of the year, on a small tour of its native Canada, April 3 through 7. Over the past few days, Wolf Parade's MySpace pageviews, MySpace song plays and iLike fan subscriptions have all increased exponentially.

This is good news for a band heading out on the big road. As the numbers show, the fan interest is still there for Wolf Parade. And as the Twitter conversations show, the enthusiasm is alive and rumbling on a personal level.

However, Wolf Parade has neither a main Web presence nor an official Facebook page. Adding these things would only help drive Internet buzz.

After all, it's not 2009 anymore.

*We don't really have Wolf-Seeker™ technology. I made that up. But we do know everything.

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Imagine a universe, parallel to our own, where a self-described "avant-garde cellist" can take her cello and her foot-operated laptop and, without any sort of record deal whatsoever, focus half her energy on her music and the other half on marketing herself through social media and old-fashioned hustling and ACTUALLY MAKE A LIVING AT IT.

The universe you've just imagined? It's the real world, bub. And in terms of building a diverse career and lasting relationships with fans, Zoe Keating is on top of it.

The classically trained Canadian musician and former member of cello trio Rasputina has taken her bow, her wits and her business savvy and carved out a DIY niche for herself in an industry where even mass-appealing artists are faltering.

It helps that her Twitter account, @ZoeCello, has 1.3+million followers on Twitter, a number she arrived at by becoming a Twitter suggested user. That is, the kind folks at Twitter decided to list Zoe among the prominent users that are suggested to people when they initially sign up.

Writing about an interview she did for Press:Here, Keating says:

What is great about Twitter is that, like I said in the interview, it allows me to be myself to as many people as possible. Me and my music are the same thing and I've always had this stubborn, egotistical belief that if I just had a chance to get the real me across....people would be interested. The belief that what I'm doing is worthwhile, even if no one hears it, has sustained me through a lot of rejections and hard times.

Hopefully those hard times are coming to an end. In addition to her media savvy and her incredible smarts when it comes to licensing her music for use in commercials and films, Keating has forged direct connections with her fans, which translate to relationships, which translates to marketing muscle, which translates to sales.

Now, as we fire up RockDex and look at her social networking numbers, bear in mind that Keating is a classical artist. She won't incur the kind of traffic that a Jay-Z, or even an Arcade Fire, will. In fact, her views on MySpace (not exactly the best measure of classical tastes) are in the hundreds.

As of this writing, RockDex is tracking 32,285 fans of Keating across MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm and iLike, with just under a million song plays. The numbers Keating is generating are good but not exactly multi-platinum.

What is compelling: the interaction.

RockDex's Twitter functionality shows a two-way picture of the artists' real-time exchanges with fans. And this is where Zoe excels.

First, let's look at a recent Twitter campaign. On March 18, Keating gave a free download of a new song from her album, Into the Trees, in exchange for a tweet. Fans who took advantage were given a custom bit.ly link to pass to their own tweeps. As the screenshot below shows, this boosted tweets about her from the single digits in the previous week to 213 in a single day.

To see whether it was in fact the free song that caused the spike, we can dig down and look at individual tweets.

Yep, it was the song alright.

And it happened again four days later.

We can also use RockDex to see how many messages were sent to @ZoeCello. Whether they namecheck "Zoe Keating" or not, these messages are valuable to track because they provide a glimpse of people talking directly to Zoe Keating. It's like fan mail. And on March 18, the day she posted the song, Zoe got 391 pieces.

Technically, Keating could login to Twitter, dig back through her account, and count up the number of people who used "@ZoeCello" in a tweet on March 18. But as a DIY artist, she's got better things to do with her time.

And that's where RockDex comes in, showing precisely how successful an artist like Zoe's individual social media campaigns are.

After all, her career is practically built on them.

For more Zoe, check out her Ignite presentation on the trials and travails of quitting your job to become a rock star.

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Leaking new singles to bloggers is one of the most common ways bands try to drum up publicity for a tour or new album release.

But without tools to monitor what kind of traffic the track generates once it's posted by bloggers, how can bands know the precise impact a leaked download or streaming song generates?

Today's RockDex Case Study focuses on New York-based, Minneapolis-bred rock belters The Hold Steady. Down to a quartet following the departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay, the sans-Franz Steady is preparing to release its fifth full-length, Heaven Is Whenever, on May 4.

Photo by Judson Baker

Within the past week, The Hold Steady has released two songs from the album to bloggers. The result: RockDex shows definite increases in social web traffic and online conversation that are directly traceable to both leaks.

Let's start with Twitter. On March 22, THS allowed Pitchfork to premiere the new track "Hurricane J." Word spread instantly and virally, particularly via Pitchfork's own Twitter feed through retweets.

The chart below shows the March 22 spike in mentions of The Hold Steady on Twitter -- 389 tweets, to be precise. It no doubt also helped that the song posting included a tour announcement. As we've shown before, announcing a tour is always a great way to stoke conversation.

And as we drill down into individual tweets, RockDex shows how immediate the viral spread occurred following the inital 'Fork tweet.

Just yesterday, March 29, NY Mag's Vulture Blog (not as influential as P-fork, but still big) got the exclusive to post single no. 2 from Heaven, "Rock Problems." This time, the spike was a bit smaller, at 250 tweets.

And, again, we can see the domino effect that the Vulture blog's initial tweet set off. Note also how many of the fans who retweet the song reshape the message to make it their own, becoming, in effect, individual marketers packaging the band's content for consumption by their friends. You just can't buy that kind of trust-based enthusiasm.

The impact wasn't relegated to Twitter, however.

On March 23, The Hold Steady's MySpace received 1,929 views -- an increase of 125% over the previous day. Traffic remained high but tapered off immediately after, and then rose again on March 30. (Note the day-long delay between when news hits Twitter vs. MySpace.)

As of this writing, the band hasn't posted the second (and, we think, better) song, "Rock Problems," to MySpace, but RockDex's MySpace singles chart shows that "Hurricane J" is a definite hit.

So, the next time your band is considering releasing a song to the blogosphere, how will you measure its impact?

Also, it's important to note that in neither case was the song given away as an MP3 -- both instances were stream only. Do you think that if The Hold Steady had chosen to leak free MP3s, they would've gotten more buzz?

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It's official. Canadian indie rock is a global game.

Its main players : Arcade Fire. With two Grammy-nominated albums under its collective pinball flipper (not that the rest of the world cares about the Grammys, mind you), the seven-year-old band from Montreal recently dropped news of some international tour dates, presumably to build up buzz around the as-yet-unannounced LP3.

Looking at the band's RockDex numbers, these tour announcements account for the biggest social media traffic increases the Arcade Fire has seen in months.

On March 8, the band revealed that its first 2010 tour date would be at the Oxegen Festival in Ireland in July. The repercussions are clearly reflected in RockDex's Twitter Stats, with 500 tweets tracked on March 8, plus specific mentions of Oxegen by AF tweeps.

We can also look at a RockDex's Tweet Locations world map to see how many Arcade Fire-mentioning tweets have generated from the Emerald Isle in the past month.

The next day, the Fire got even higher when the band dually announced it would be playing the Rock Werchter Fest in Belgium and the Hove Festival in Norway.

And how has all this played out on MySpace? Here, too, it's created the biggest bump in profile views the band has seen in three months.

More recently -- and closer to home -- on March 22, the Arcade Fire declared plans to play the Osheaga Festival in Montreal on July 31, causing the second-highest Twitter spike in March.

However, as you look at those individual tweets below the graph for March 22, you'll notice chatter about something else: news of a video of Macy Gray covering Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" at Perez Hilton's SXSW party this past weekend.

Pretty sweet. Thank you, RockDex.

In conclusion, it's fairly easy to see the value of social media analytics to bands and the managers, labels and publicists they work with. The first lesson: Social traffic follows real-world events. It's not enough for a band to stay at home, just recording and trying, to engage fans digitally only. In-person contact through live shows is still the most important point of contact between a band and its fans. That's why people sit up and take notice when their favorite groups go on tour. Even fans who aren't near the tour route help spread the fire.

And if anyone from Arcade Fire is looking at this, you might wanna take note of who's talking about your band. Using RockDex, you can find out who these people are, where they are, and, ideally, target your messages to them. Think our ladyfriend Laurel Davis-Lyons in Leicester might like to receive an @reply from the official @ArcadeFire account encouraging her to get off the fence? And might she even get a little excited and tell all her friends? Hmmm...

After all, while RockDex does give the 10,000-foot worldwide view, it's important to remember these numbers wouldn't exist without individual fans. Can't forget the little peeps!

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With the dust settling from another truly epic SXSW (and with our livers on hiatus), we thought we'd look at the data RockDex has collected for a few of the conference's most buzzed-about bands and see what kind of boost they got from the events last week in Austin.

We've chosen superhot indie bands Surfer Blood and the Morning Benders, plus blues/soul revivalist Black Joe Lewis. Though RockDex was at SXSW all week long, we didn't see a single dadgum one of these bands. We were too busy networking, eating and drinking with our fellow music industry peeps to catch much festival music. Still, the streets were all atwitter (pun intended) about all three of these bands.

And in terms of social media usage at SXSW, Twitter was by and large the most useful tool for getting and sharing real-time information about the conference. Everyone was on Twitter, posting tips about free food at parties, celebrity sightings, impossibly long lines, schedule changes, and everything under the Austin sun.

The RockDex Twitter Quick Stats charts for Surfer Blood and Black Joe Lewis show definite spikes in Twitter mentions last week. By drilling down below the chart and looking at individual Twitter Updates on the highest-charting days, we can see that tweets are indeed coming from SXSW. (Click on the pictures below to see 'em up close.)

For the Morning Benders -- while SXSW did play a part in driving conversation on Twitter -- it was a March 17 Pitchfork review that produced the biggest spike of 212 tweets. Good timing, no?

The Tweet Locations feature shows a bigger picture of Twitter activity for each band -- and for SXSW as a whole.

Until Twitter finds out a way to geo-tag tweets, locations of tweets are based on the city/area listed in user profiles. While there was much Austin-based tweeting for all three bands, notice that there's also a good deal of activity from the bands' hometowns: NYC for Surfer Blood and SF for Morning Benders.

Looks like the Austin-based Black Joe has some friends in the North by Northeast.

All in all, it was an amazing week of music and shenanigans for RockDex and our friends at Locker Partner. Here's hoping that next year we'll be able to focus less on the business and spend more time rocking out.

Did you go to SXSW? What'd you see that was cool?

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