We describe an approach to measure popularity of music tracks, albums and artists by automatically studying the comments on music listeners at social network sites such as MySpace. This measure of popularity is more accurate than the traditional measure of album sales figures, as demonstrated by our focus group study. We faced many challenges while trying to generate a popularity ranking from the user comments at social network sites, e.g., broken English sentences, comment spam, server bandwidth limit, etc. We discuss the steps we took to overcome them and prepare a end-to-end system for generating a new popularity measure.
By: Julia Grace, Daniel Gruhl, Kevin Haas, Meena Nagarajan, Christine Robson, Nachiketa Sahoo
Published in: RJ10421 in 2007
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