Traditional music charts, such as Billboard’s and Rolling Stone’s, depend mainly on two things to put together their rankings: sales and radio airplay. Truth is, people are consuming music in more ways than those two mediums, especially with the internet in tow.
A new music aggregator called We Are Hunted is hoping to change this, providing rankings that go beyond traditional metrics. Instead of just sales and radio airplay, it digs deep into the web’s voluminous data to try and measure “sentiment, expression and advocacy,” reaching into such sources as user playlists of internet radio providers, music blogs, YouTube views, Twitter rolls and torrent downloads (yes, they went there), among other sources. Currently in beta, they add up the numbers and offer the top 99 songs of each day for listening on their site.
The site itself is simple and easy to use, with a very clean interface. The home page shows off the highest ranking songs, nine of them at a time, along with an artist name and an identifying image. Starting from the top spots, users can move through the listing all the way through to the 99th entry, without a single page refresh.
Not a lot of options are offered, though, which does keep clutter away from the site. Apart from the navigation and playback, users can post a comment directly via Facebook Connect or purchase it from iTunes.
Personally, I love everything about We Are Hunted, from the simple interface to the fact that it lets me discover new artists that people are listening to. Its all-inclusive measurements are the real future of music charts, whether We Are Hunted survives as the premiere player in that game or not.
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