Music Arsenal Blog

Here at Music Arsenal HQ in sunny Omaha, NE we've been hard at work on an all new version of RockDex. We began RockDex simply as a cool site to track your online buzz but the response has been so overwhelming we decided to take it a step further. We heard your requests and have developed deeper tracking, better results, detailed data and more. We call it RockDex Pro!

So what does this mean for you? You'll be able to better understand where and who your fans are and what they're saying about you. Maybe that deep cut on your new album is the most buzzed about track and you should consider giving it a little more attention. Plan your next tour around hot cities and interact with your fans buzzing about your the most. Find and cultivate that tribe and 1000 true fans.

We plan on releasing this into the wild soon and if you signup for early warning we'll let you know before anyone else and give you first chance to use RockDex Pro. We promise no long waits. (We'll also start deep tracking for any artist that signs up)

We'll also be giving one on one phone demos several times a week so if you're interested, indicate in the form. If you don't want a demo and just want to say whats up we want to hear from you.

Now for the goods! Feast your eyes on the first shots of RockDex Pro! Make sure to click the images for full size.

We have several artists and companies using this pro version now and have had great feedback! Needless to say we're very very VERY excited for this! Remember to signup for early notice, keep an eye here and follow us on twitter for updates!

Twitter has undoubtedly become what many are calling the next big thing in music promotion. There have been several success stories and on the same hand some have been disappointed by the results. If you look beyond individual case studies its interesting to see how artists and fans are using twitter to expose music and what methods are most popular.

RockDex has been tracking millions of Twitter posts as part of our upcoming RockDex Pro edition and garnered some pretty interesting data. We've poured over your tweets and categorized the biggest sources of twitter music discussion and discovery.

First off, a breakdown of all tweet sources. These are tweets containing an artist's name. If the tweet states something along the lines of, "I love Rocket From The Crypt" it is categorized as a general tweet. If the tweet content is "Rocket From The Crypt - Born in '69 http://blip.fm/~8p7l4" it is categorized as a blip.fm tweet and so on. Artists like Cursive, The Streets and Rush were excluded from this study for being overly used in non-music contexts. Click on a chart for a larger view.

You can see that the vast majority of these tweets are general posts about an artist. However 3.6% of all music tweets come from blip.fm and another 5% were from radio stations tweeting what they're playing right now.

If we break this down further we can see what percentage of specialized tweets come from individual sources excluding general tweets. These are tweets posted from social music sites such as blip.fm, The Hype Machine and radio based sites Yes.com and RadioTAGr.com.

Finally here is a chart of specialized tweet sources without radio station tweets. I've excluded radio from this chart because radio tweets don't require any human interaction (both yes.com and RadioTagr.com are generally automated) as tweets from these social music sites do. 

You can see currently Blip.fm is leading the pack far and wide. Although twt.fm is only holding 6.01% of the market share right now, keep in mind they only launched five months ago and are a site to keep your eye on.

We'll update these charts as we collect more data and new social music sites are created. If you'd like more information or want to check out a demo of RockDex Pro e-mail me at jimmy@musicarsenal.com.

RockDex was launched just over a week ago and what a first week its been! We haven't done much more promotion than a post on this blog, some tweets (@musicarsenal), and e-mails to Music Arsenal users and the response has been great!

First, some quick stats! We've had over 800 artists check their score since we launched. The average score of the international artists is 68.6, national artists is 41.6 and regional artists is 34.5. We will be using this new data to tweak our algorithm over the next couple of weeks and will announce any adjustments.

Blog Posts

We've also had a handful of blogs make some great posts about us! Big thanks to Greg Rollett of Gen-Y Rock Stars for their RockDex Review and Contest! You can read the posts here:

RockDex Review and Contest - Gen-Y Rock Stars
Rockdex: See How Much You Rock - LockerPartner
Music Arsenal Launches RockDex @ SXSW - Silicon Prairie News

New Music!

Not only have our computers been working overtime to pump out the scores but our ears have been working overtime to check out new music. Being the snoops we are we're listening to a lot of the artists that get checked out on RockDex. We've heard some great stuff! We've also had two artists send us music via our SoundCloud Dropbox and we loved them both! If you wanna rock and or roll how about you take a listen to The Bron-Yr-Aurs. If you want to get mellow and hear some sweet soothing sounds check out The Sweater Friends.

Make sure to meet up with us at SXSW! E-Mail Us or say hey at the RedGorilla Showcase we're doing with our friends at Indie Extreme on Thursday, March 19th at the Blind Pig Pub between 4pm and 8pm.