We first profiled We Are Hunted a few weeks back and they have continued to be one of my favorite music discovery sites along with Grooveshark and The Sixty One.

This week they released 2 major features that are really exciting for their company and also for us music marketers and musicians out there.

The first feature is a new music discovery application built on the Myspace API called Hunted Radio. Essentially the app monitors what Myspace users are listening to and plays you songs based on the most popular song in the last 60 seconds! They state that the music is a mix of

emerging hip-hop, indie and a strange splash of country.

You can listen to Hunted Radio through their Myspace player, or on your iPhone or Android mobile device.

We Are Hunted Research

The second release is the one I am all excited about, We Are Hunted Research. They have amassed a ton of data from looking into social networks and what people are listening to on the social web over the last few months. And they want to share it!

Right now on their research page they have listed the most popular artists and the one I decided to look into was Grizzly Bear. When you download the PDF report, here is what they have the ability to show you:

This report reviews the popularity of Grizzly Bear on the music charts and in the music news for the period 2009. It benchmarks Grizzly Bear against the 1,935 artists that appeared on the We Are Hunted charts during this period. The results are based on an analysis of 216,617 music articles and 11,728,789 music related tweets. News is sourced from a range of publishers including all the major music news sites and an army of passionate bloggers worldwide. Charts are compiled from samples of hundreds of charts in a range of music genres. This report was written by the We Are Hunted team and generated using the semantic analysis system that powers the wearehunted.com website.

From there you can see charts and graphs (over 30 pages worth) that include:

The Mainstream Chart

This section presents the mainstream chart performance for Grizzly Bear compared to similar artists. Grizzly Bear was ranked 62nd overall of the 1,935 artists analyzed. During this period the average chart position on the We Are Hunted mainstream chart for Grizzly Bear was 7th.

Mainstream Comparison

This section compares the mainstream chart performance of Grizzly Bear against similar artists. These charts illustrate relative popularity over time. Popularity is computed from the normalised chart position for each day. 1.0 means Grizzly Bear was ranked 1st overall of our charts for that day. 0.0 denotes Grizzly Bear did not chart at all.

Emerging Chart

This section presents the emerging chart performance for Grizzly Bear compared to similar artists. Grizzly Bear was ranked 9th overall of the 1,935 artists analyzed. During this period the average chart position on the We Are Hunted emerging chart for Grizzly Bear was 4th.

Emerging Comparison

This section compares the emerging chart performance of Grizzly Bear against similar artists. These charts illustrate relative popularity over time. Popularity is computed from the normalised chart position for each day. 1.0 means Grizzly Bear was ranked 1st overall of our charts for that day. 0.0 denotes Grizzly Bear did not chart at all.

Mainstream Singles

This section presents the best charting singles for Grizzly Bear on the Mainstream We Are Hunted charts

Emerging Singles

This section presents the best charting singles for Grizzly Bear on the Emerging We Are Hunted charts

New Popularity

This section shows the total number of music articles mentioning Grizzly Bear during this time period and the overall rank of Grizzly Bear when compared to similar artists.

News Comparison

This section compares the number of music articles mentioning Grizzly Bear during this time period to similar artists.

Top Publishers

Twitter Popularity

This section shows the number of tweets indicating that someone was listening to Grizzly Bear during this time period. Included is the overall ranking of Grizzly Bear when compared to similar artists.

ReTweet Coverage

This section shows the total clicks generated by retweets of articles mentioning Grizzly Bear during this time period.

Twitter News Activity

This section lists the articles mentioning Grizzly Bear that were shared the most on Twitter during this period.

News Highlights

This section includes the most repeated statements in the music press about Grizzly Bear month by month during this period.

And then comes the Appendixes…

THIS IS PURE MARKETING GOLD!!!!

First comes a list of all the top publishers that wrote something about Grizzly Bear. It even tells you how many times they published something with their band name in it. They list the top 100 sources!

This is like my new gold mine. If I had an artist that sounded like Grizzly Bear, I know how over 100 sources that wrote articles about them. Time to get to work, but that’s not all.

There is also a list of the top 200 overall publishers that We Are Hunted Indexes. From the New York Times to Hype Machine all the way down to The Vinyl District, Jazz Times and White Folks Get Crunk.

If your music was charted on We Are Hunted (there were over 1,900 artists featured) you can shoot them a quick email and they can run a similar report for you. This is amazing work and something that is priceless to the artists, marketing companies, management teams and smart asses that can actually do something powerful with this amount of data!

What do you think about this kind of data availability? What else can you do with these numbers and figures? What is missing? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments below.

-Greg