MidemNet 2009 Liveblog: Knowing Your Fans panel

Next up is a panel session on knowing your fans, moderated by Hypebot's Bruce Houghton, and featuring EMI's Cory Ondrejka, Band Metrics' Duncan Freeman and Million's Neil Cartwright.Freeman is up first, who explains we have ubiquitous internet access nowadays, and that there's been a sea-change (the buzzphrase of MidemNet so far) of social networking, with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on. And also the decreased cost of developing a music site – you can have a Muxtape up and running in a few weeks.”What you've done is created this platform to launch data at an astounding rate,” he says. So what can you do with all the data that's being produced around music – everything from how many times people have played x track on MySpace, to people's comments on their social networking profile or Twitter about a band, song or gig. Which ties neatly into what Band Metrics is doing, of course.Over to Ondrejka, who agrees with all of the above. “Look at that from inside a major, the scale becomes much bigger. The amount of data that we generate even on a weekly basis runs into the terabytes,” he says. So EMI is trying to get a handle [...]