Sound index: Charts for the people, by the people

The Sound Index system demonstrates a new way to measure popularity in the world of music by incorporating the web, online communities and social networks. The Sound Index system catalogs the hottest artists and tracks who are most popular on the web. It provides a current view of popular music content online, by incorporating listens, plays, downloads, sales, and comments from a multitude of online communities and social networks. The system can be divided into four parts, supporting technology called MONitoring Global Online Opinions via Semantic Extraction (MONGOOSE). The system analyzes and transforms the data into a standard schema. The now-structured content is then stored in the system's database. Finally, the system generates music charts by applying relevant ordering schemes. The Sound Index topic detection methodology accounts for whether a post is on- or off topic, with the latter consisting of spam or nonsense posts. It automates simple corrective actions, including killing and restarting fetchers.