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Music Stats

Data Analysts Attempt To Predict World's Largest Music Vote, Again 41

littlekorea writes "Data analysts in the U.S. and Australia have come up with alternative means to predict the world's largest music vote, Triple J's Hottest 100. The Warmest 100 was close to spot on last year after analysts mined data from social posts auto-generated during the voting process. This year, with that avenue shut off, they relied on data extracted using the Instagram API, among others, and hope to achieve similar results."
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Data Analysts Attempt To Predict World's Largest Music Vote, Again

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  • by stoborrobots ( 577882 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @03:33AM (#46022327)

    There were fewer than 200,000 votes cast last year - they've sampled close to 10% of the actual votes, so I'm sure they'll have a reasonable approximation of the final result...

    • That doesn't sound right. There were 1.26 million votes cast in 2011 and 1.4 million votes cast this year (source: the official Hottest 100 webpage and Wikipedia). I can't find last year's figures but they would be somewhere in that range.

      Fairly impressive for a country with a population of ~23M.

      • by abhi_beckert ( 785219 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:12AM (#46022471)

        That doesn't sound right.

        It depends whether you consider a "vote" to be a song choice, or a person who voted.

        Voters submit a list of their favourite handful of songs, they don't pick one. Triple J usually picks the number of song submissions, not the number of people who voted, since it's the songs themselves that they count.

        Fairly impressive for a country with a population of ~23M.

        A lot of the votes aren't by australians. Triple J streams worldwide for free and they have extremely good taste in music. Their charter requires, by law, that they do not have any ads except to promote music and culture, which means they promote music and festivals that they think are interesting, but don't collect any revenue for it.

        So there are plenty of people around the world who tune in.

        The event is several hours long, and it takes place on a national public holiday when everyone is off work. I've been invited to more than one party, to spend the whole day listening to music, drinking beer, eating bad food and trying to find some shade and/or water (bloody hot here this time of year!).

        • by MrKaos ( 858439 )

          A lot of the votes aren't by australians. Triple J streams worldwide for free and they have extremely good taste in music. Their charter requires, by law, that they do not have any ads except to promote music and culture, which means they promote music and festivals that they think are interesting, but don't collect any revenue for it.

          They also used to have a much more comprehensive current affairs programs and I fear they have lost much. Though, provisions in the AUS-USA fta may have an influence on this. However I enjoy the music and they are pretty good at that, though I do miss the drum promotions - some were pretty funny.

        • Parent poster here.

          Good point - having never voted myself I wasn't aware that there are multiple votes per person, so that makes sense now.

          But I do know about JJJ and their worldwide audience ... because I am one. I'm Australian but live overseas and I'll be tuning in for the countdown :)

    • It's not voting, its masturbation, now with a new and improved predictive algorithm. Now we know who launched it and where the best stains will land, and the music industry wets itself again. Sometimes it's depressing to be human.
  • So wait... you're saying that when you look at what people are posting on the internet... you can tell what their opinions are on something? NO WAY!!!!! -_- How is this "predictive" by any definition? We've known for awhile that if you get a sample size of maybe 1-3% of a group... you can predict the distribution with a good degree of accuracy. There's nothing special about this slashvertisement.

    • Most people who vote for the Hottest 100 do not post stuff on the internet, so the statisticians will need to account for and attempt to remove the bias towards the style of music people who are active online prefer. That's not easy.

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

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