So what is 'hype'? When a band has it, every blog that covers music seems to be talking about them. When a band doesn't, well, they receive only cursory lip service. At times, the concept of 'hype' has felt completely binary. On or off. 1 or 0. Hype or no hype. Pitchfork would tell their readers what was cool. Metacritic would tell their readers what the critics thought was cool. And the blogs would froth and bark their own opinions. It has been a gloriously functional mess for at least the last five years.
But for a band trying to make decisions about their future (read: do I quit teaching kindergarten in order to tour, or similar), hype was frustratingly hard to quantify. 'Do we even have fans in Raleigh? Will anyone come out to the show?' It is this doubt that Band Metrics aims to remove.
Read Write & Web's recent piece on the new application caught my attention with the sheer simplicity of the idea. For some bands, their entire existence amounts to a MySpace or Last.fm page. They can see the download counter going up, up, up, on their mp3's, but have no way of knowing just who is doing the downloading. Or what those people are saying about them on the blog/message boards. Or where those people live, what else they like, etc. It is analytics for the grassroots music business. And its a very cool idea.
The questions that remain, however: How many bands will be comfortable enough with the practicality of the service to buy in? Once the information is collected, how are bands going to leverage that information? How does one mobilize a following that exists purely on the web?
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