What if there was a Billboard Charts for the music people really listened to and talked about on the Web. We Are Hunted wants to be that definitive online music chart. The service monitors the most popular songs on iLike, BitTorrent, Last.fm, MySpace Music, and other Web music services, as well as discussions on Twitter, blogs, and press sites. A collaboration between Australian news aggregation site WotNews and digital music marketers Native Digital, We Are Hunted uses a whole bunch of sentiment and semantic analysis, along with clustering algorithms to come up with the top 99 songs of the day. It then presents these in a 3 X 3 grid of album art for each song, which can be played in its entirety on the site. (The songs are streamed from YouTube or the artists’ sites).
The songs themselves are pretty catchy for the most part. Here are the top nine:
- “Corner” by Embarrassing
- “Life In The Future_M…” by Voxtrot
- “Whispering Your Name” by Alison Moyet
- “Tunisia Bambaata (mercury Remix)” by DJ Mehdi
- “Cat State Comity” by Mazes
- “This Tainted Love” by DJ Zebra
- “Whoa Billy” by Lucky Soul
- “Saddle Up” by the Boy Least
- “The Strangers” by St. Vincent
You won’t find these names on the Billboard 100, but people are listening to them on the Web.
My initial reaction to We Are Hunted is that it delivers on what it is intended to be: a discovery mechanism for new music. Where it falls short is in its features and UI. It forces you to click on each song to play it, instead of letting you listen to an entire grid or the entire chart as a play list (update: this has been fixed). You can log in via Facebook Connect and leave a comment on a song, and buy each song on iTunes, but you can’t do much else. And sometimes a song won’t play. But if you like the Hype Machine, then you might want to check out We Are Hunted when the songs in your iPod begin to seem old.
We need one of these for stocks, instead of the NASDAQ and DOW. One for the Apple, Netflix, Wind, Solar, etc… One that is focused on our future economy, so minus the GM’s, Ford’s, etc…
Awesome site – great music!
OT: What is with the all capitalisation in the blog post titles here at TechCrunch? It always takes me a few seconds just to figure out what is the company/web site name which I can then interpret the rest of the title around.
Headlines Are All Caps
Yes, in 1963 they are. Some blogs do, some blogs don’t. Just given TechCrunch’s focus it does make it hard.
Your opening sentence should read, “What if there was a Billboard Charts for the music young, hip white Americans really listened to…”
Billboard Charts exists for a reason. It monitors what the general population listens to already. But I’m sure you knew that.
Very cool. Definitely gotta it check out.
It’s great, but it’s clearly not what “most people are listening to on the web,” which probably in reality mirrors the Billboard chart rather closely.
not according to them. Billboard is more influenced by radio play anyway. It reflects what radio DJs are playing and all that implies rather than what people are playing for themselves.
Short and sweet.
(1) Yes, you should be able to play the song without clicking a link. (2) I like the homepage links between day/week/month/year so that it gives a constant timeline look without having to wait for the year’s end and such. (3) E-mail subscription!
Ar first I wanted to dissmis this, but after reading the article I think it’s a great idea. As long as they don’t assume people are only listening to lame boring 3 piece suit bands like Coldplay and Radiohead.
FYI- The Billboard charts are music sales, airplay and digital ranking reports.
This site isn’t the least bit accurate, go look at the #1 bands my space or Last.FM plays. I just wrote a blog ahnilating all of their charts!
http://musforma...o-the-task.html
There can be any number of rankings. Why not what people listen online?
Nice Idea!
Cool stuff, but could only stream a couple of the 99, hope it’ll improve
Congratulations – you just found a chart of music people are listening to that isn’t worth paying for.
I don’t understand the point of the search. If you are already searching for a song, what’s that got to do with what people listen to? Makes no sense to me…
I’m down but I’d really like to be able to RSS feed the charts as an update daily
Great chart worth paying for!