The ways people find and collect music have changed radically over the last decade. There is considerably less emphasis on the buying and selling of physical media as these forms are replaced by purchased digital downloads and streaming services, alongside a well-established system of peer-to-peer unlicensed distribution via protocols like BitTorrent. Add to this the advent of social networks, both general and music-focused, and the result is a fundamental change in how fans interact with both music and the artists the produce it. These new forms of interaction all share a common feature -- they are digitally recorded. During this talk we'll look these digital interaction breadcrumbs from various social (e.g. Facebook, Soundcloud) and peer-to-peer (BitTorrent) networks and other sources. We'll take a look at how Musicmetric handles some of the problems associated with data collection. Then we'll walk through what data is available (and machine-readable!) via Musicmetric's JSON API and look at some example applications of these data-sources.

Ben Fields leads Musicmetric's data science team in an attempt to wrangle some sanity into the Internet's vast supply of horribly formed music data. He has a PhD from the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group in the Computing Department at Goldsmiths University of London. His work there focused on merging social and acoustic similarity spaces to drive playlist creation and related user-facing systems. He is an expert on metadata, structured data, the semantic web and recommendation systems. In his spare time, he is a co-chair of the annual International Workshop On Music Recommendation And Discovery, has given an Ignite London talk about beer styles, occasionally DJs, is an accredited beer judge and homebrews beer. He thinks bios in the third person are weird but figures that's how they're meant to be written.