We Are Hunted: Cultural Barometer Or Not Yet Up To The Task!

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Weare hunted.jpgTonight, TechCrunch broke the news of a new site called, We Are Hunted. The site’s intent is to update the music industries’ charts by finding what people are listening to on the internet, rather than what they are buying in stores. We all know, no one buys music anymore, so a site like this would be very useful! The service monitors the most popular songs on iLike, BitTorrent,
Last.fm, MySpace Music and other Web music services, as well as
discussions on Twitter, blogs, and press sites. While TechCrunch may be the best site for Tech start-up news on the web, they missed the ball on this one! We Are Hunted claims these songs are the biggest artists on the web right now, my analysis is they need to tweak their algorithim!

  1. “Corner” by Embarrassing
  2. “Life In The Future_M…” by Voxtrot
  3. “Whispering Your Name” by Alison Moyet
  4. “Tunisia Bambaata (mercury Remix)” by DJ Mehdi
  5. “Cat State Comity” by Mazes
  6. “This Tainted Love” by DJ Zebra
  7. “Whoa Billy” by Lucky Soul
  8. “Saddle Up” by the Boy Least
  9. “The Strangers” by St. Vincent

Anyone who knows anything about music listening on the web knows that the majority of Internet music listening is done on YouTube and Myspace. Until this site figures in YouTube, it is totally inaccurate. Take for example a song like Brokencyde’s “Schizophrenia” which has been played 4 MILLLION times (2 Million on myspace alone) in the last 90 days, you are now telling me that Dj Mehdi (66,000 myspace plays) compares to that???? Not plausible! Let’s take it bigger Beyonce “Halo” with 20 Million plays in the last 100 or so days on YouTube alone. Not on We Are Hunted, but DJ Zebra is on it??? All of that aside, let’s say they are counting only the data they say they are counting. The band that is #1 on We Are Hunted is Embarrassing Fruits “Corner”, who has a
grand total of 840 plays on their Myspace, without a easily searchable
YouTube of the song in question. How many listens does this song have at Last.FM?
embarrassing.jpgNow that’s what I call embarrassing! Yet somehow, they are the number one band on the internet? I think this site is some poor girl in Australia’s mixtape, not a tech startup!

Jesse Cannon is the editor of Musformation. He produces records at his studio Cannon Found Soundation. Follow him on Twitter at @JesseCannonMusF. For more info please visit his website.

  • pluggerguy

    Hey Jesse,
    Thanks for your review. Tough but fair.
    We know we have a lot of work in front of us. We’ll do our best to improve.
    Cheers,
    Stephen Phillips
    wotnews.com

  • http://www.doingwords.com bigyahu.myopenid.com

    Personally, I’m interested in the *underground* kind of popular – the stuff that’s popular with people who don’t listen to most of their music on youtube and the first few pages of myspace. Because I already know what Beyonce sounds like. So for me, We Are Hunted works, but I appreciate that’s not going to work for everybody.

  • Jesse Cannon

    I think my greater point was there was no possible way that Embarrassing Fruits “Corner”was able to be the #1 song on all these social networks when it was played that little. I see We Are Hunted has since adopted a more populist take on these charts. My point is they should do what they are claiming. there is no way any band with 30 plays on Last.FM and myspace music with 800 is the top of the charts for “underground bands”