MusicVISTA Enhancement: Profile Your Key Artists to Learn Their Strengths

As I mentioned in the December newsletter, we are implementing a large number of fantastic new features in MusicVISTA, which already defines the leading edge of music research analysis.

Here is a brief summary of the latest enhancement!

Understand Artists Era Distribution and Strength

One of the important things we must think about when implementing an AMT is how we manage popular artists. How do we distribute them among categories? How do we avoid artist conflicts that make scheduling more difficult?

This new report will give you another tool for understanding who your most important artists are and how to deal with them.

Select Artist and Song Distribution Detail from the Report menu. The name has been changed to reflect the new ability to show the distribution for only a single artist.

The report will allow you to look at the distribution of songs among any selected group of the filters you have set up. It is common for programmers to set up Eras, and see how songs distribute among them. In particular, how does the distribution of the hits (top 100, top 200) compare to the overall distribution? Note that you can also highlight any group of songs. Their distribution will appear in the right-most column. So you can easily look at the top 50, for example.

In the example below, we are looking at Eras. But of course we can show how songs distribute among any set of filters we want. If you’re tracking tempo, sound codes, genres or anything else that can be measured for a song, it can be used as a basis to compare songs.

Below, we see that songs from the 1960s and 1970s have a stronger than average presence in the top 100 while songs form the 1980s are weaker than average.

To use the new ability to work with individual artists, simply check the box: Limit to a specific artist

A list of every artist in the AMT appears. Initially displayed alphabetically, you can resort the list in order by number of songs in the test, as was done in the example above. Simply click on the column heading to change the sort order.

Click on the name of an artist to view how their songs are distributed by Era or other set of filters. In the example below, we look the Rolling Stones.

Particularly when working with all songs, some programmers like to paste the distribution information into Excel for further work, or into a word processing program for notes or a report. We make it easy, with one click to copy the results you want to the Windows clipboard. In the example below, we are using 5 year age breaks. How you set up era filters is entirely under your control.

A number of the most recent enhancements to MusicVISTA, like this one, are designed to make it easier to access information about your artists, see which ones are most important, and give you the information you need to properly manage them. You’ll be better able to avoid artist conflicts in scheduling, and balance them across categories. More to come. Guaranteed.

MusicVISTA Gets a New Report: Opinion Distribution

Click for full size.

Just when you might have thought there couldn’t be any more ways that MusicVISTA could slice and dice your music test, here is another report.

Purpose

There are many reasons you might want to see how the opinions from an AMT are distributed.

For example, you see lower scores than normal. Are Favorites down? Did you get a lot of “No Opinion” responses? Is the number of “Tired Of” responses up significantly?

What about different groups (which we call “breaks”? How do Pure Core format fans compare to the Total Sample? What about your competitor’s 18-24 Males?

Using the Report

The report always shows the distribution for the Total Sample. Below, you can select any of the AMTs sub-groups. The distribution of opinions for the selected break is shown, along with the difference between this opinion’s percent for this break compared to  the Total Sample.

Moving Music Research Software Into 2011

I’m staring at a long list of things I hope to accomplish in 2011. All of them are connected to making music research a more powerful and accurate tool for program directors around the world.

New Year, New Foundation

First step taken: I have moved the MusicVISTA software to a new version: Windows Seven and have set it up within Microsoft’s powerful Visual Studio 2010 development system.

That needs a brief explanation. Modern software does so much now, with all the visual elements, communications and multimedia, etc. that without some help, it would be impossible for mere humans to write computer programs.

Fortunately, huge and powerful systems have been invented to help. For Apple, the set of tools most often used is called XCode. For Microsoft it is Visual Studio. In addition, Microsoft provides a powerful version of the been-around-forever Basic language. It is called Visual Basic.Net. An example of the power: You can draw a picture of a Web browser and, yes, you now have a real Web browser waiting for the address of the page you want to display.

VB.Net is so easy to use that even I can write powerful software like MusicVISTA. You can too. There is even a free version that is far more powerful than you’d expect.

But MusicVISTA was first created about 5 years ago (as an update to the old Variety Control/MusicVUE package. Reflect on how much computers, including Windows, have changed during the past few years. With all the major updates we plan, we need the latest tools, completely compatible with Windows 7. Hence the update.

Already Making Improvements

The second step, and the first move to leverage the VS2010 environment, was to rebuild our way of playing music hooks. MusicVISTA has for some time been able to play back hook files. You can play one hook, all the hooks that define a music cluster center, or a group of hooks selected from the results display.

For those who use this feature: We are now building custom Windows Media Player playlists with the hooks we want to play and then allowing WMP to use a playlist in a single command . The advantage is that we can now stop and start the play of the hook or hooks in a smooth manner, even if you want to interrupt a hook while it plays. Technically, it was difficult. Today, it was easy.

Alternate to Hook Files

If you don’t supply hook files, remember you can always launch the song’s YouTube video instead. The advantage of the hook is the ability to hear what the respondents heard. You might decide that a given hook was not the best representation of the song. That could in some cases explain a low score or high unfamiliarity.

I like the video link. Working in so many countries and formats, I always review the top testing and most centered songs. That helps keep me up to date on the music that matters most.