Milano HeartBit

Exploring Music through Big Data in the City of Milan

Let’s make a thought experiment.

I am a musician. I have just arrived in Milan.

I want to enter the music ecosystem: I want to know what’s the vibe, what music goes on where, what’s the scene like, where to hang out and who to meet, when and where.

And, since I also make and play music, I also want to know if there is a scene for the music that I make, and what are the best places to hangout to enter that scene, and how to get a gig, and maybe even to understand who I could work with, to make music, parties, culture.

There would be many ways in which I could do these things: going to places, using search engines, searching on social networks etc.

In each of these ways, I would be very limited. Yes, compared to what I could do even 10 or 20 years ago that’s lightyears ahead. Bu, still, there would be a very limited set of subjects, such as media companies, magazines, music news services, radios that would be able to steer and influence my perception of the city, according to their strategies.

And let’s not forget search engines and social networks, and the ways in which they are changing the rules of the game. We could talk about the existence of filter bubbles and echo chambers, and the ways in which these operators can close people in bubbles to determine what they can see and what they cannot. Or the progressions according to which these operators practically force you to pay for exposure, clicks and perception, making the content which is not “sponsored” in some form or another progressively disappear.

And, most important of all, you would be very limited in your possibility to understand the big picture, and to use these understandings to create strategies, and to avoid creating them alone, on your own, but by finding people to collaborate with, and to build them together, organizing and collaborating.

Let’ make another thought experiment.

I am a venue.

I have my style, my process, my audience, which I would like to build, extend and care for.

How do I choose the artists to invite? How do I communicate? How do I reach and extend my audience? How do I compare what I’m doing to what the competition is doing? Are we stealing audiences from each other? Should I organize shows in another day of the week?

And, most important of all, what tools could I use to design some strategies according to which I can actually collaborate with other venues to organize and to act, instead of competing? Can we design joint initiatives? Combine audiences? Share costs?

These things, sometimes, happen. But there are no tools, no methods, no shared and systematic strategies for it.

On top of that, the considerations about social networks and search engines seen in the previous thought experiment work in this case, too.

A Commons?

What would happen if we created a commons to allow us to find interesting ways to address the questions raised in the thought experiments?

In the Milano HeartBit project we are doing exactly this.

Let’s take the major social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

Let’s try to capture all public expressions about live music, concerts, people going there or reviewing them, people with their bands, new songs out on SoundCloud, all in the city of Milan.

some quantities and the sentiment of the data captured since January 2017

Let’s make it really inclusive, detecting messages in 29 languages.

What happens?

It happens that we can discover a lot of things.

the emotional levels of the expressions, over time

We can understand who are these people.

the main topics of the expressions about Music in Milan

Who likes rock and electronic and reggae music.

this is the relational network of the people which talk about music in Milan on social networks: it includes 90 thousand people

We can discover how these groups of people overlap across musical genres.

these are some musical genres people talk about in Milan, over time

We can start making reasonable guesses about which people go where, and try to understand how they experienced the show.

this graph shows the interconnections between musical genres: how many people talk about Blues and Rock, about Jazz and Pop, about Hip Hop and Reggae?

We can try to understand what music people are making. And if they need a bass player or a guitar. And if they’re interested in doing something together.

a simple extraction of data: talking about Bass Guitar players in Milan using social networks

We can understand the musical calendar of our city better.

And start understanding if with its setup we’re stealing audiences from one another.

each column is a musical venue in Milan: the emotions of the expressions in that venue, what musical genres are mentioned for that venue, on which days of the week do people express more about that venue, and what is the engagement ratio that the venue can obtain

And maybe if we should do things together instead than competing.

And this is just the beginning. Where we have arrived now.

What’s next?

Because, as of now, it would still be us, alone, in our lab.

And, instead, we could come to a beautiful place like this, at BASE, and use this data together, among musicians, labels, venues, event organizers, journalists etcetera, to understand how to work together to create better music, better events, using money better to achieve a richer, more satisfied ecosystem.

And we could also relate better with our publics, starting to consider them as partners.

You can access a first experimental visualization of the Milano HeartBit project HERE, on BASE’s website.