As of February 15th, 2012, Facebook will be dropping coverage of a large quantity of metrics in order to direct users to the newer metrics introduced in the fall of 2011. The metrics Next Big Sound covers that are being dropped are daily active users, page content likes, wall posts, and comments. We encourage users to track consumptions and impressions in their stead.

In addition to this, Facebook has changed the logic behind the calculation of page fan demographics, which should cause some noticeable differences compared to previous values, but they did not report what kinds of differences users should expect.

For more detailed information on what metrics are available and what metrics are being deprecated, please refer to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/insights/

Over the two weeks, we have not received Facebook Insights updates for the large majority of artists in our system. Some metrics have updated at random, however, the vast majority remain without an update. We are actively working with Facebook to resolve this issue and recover missing days. Facebook has acknowledged that this is a bug and said, "We're backfilling the data and will update the bug when it completes. Appreciate your patience with this."

UPDATE: Facebook Insights seems to have backfilled most metrics, however, some metrics may still lag behind the 2-3 day window.

The Facebook Insights API has reported zero new visitors (unique and not) since January 10th. These values are not correct, and we don't know how long the API will continue to misreport for, but when the values correct themselves, we will be sure to backfill with the correct ones.

The Facebook Insights API has reported zero new visitors (unique and not) since January 10th. These values are not correct, and we don't know how long the API will continue to misreport for, but when the values correct themselves, we will be sure to backfill with the correct ones.

On both January 7th, January 21st, and January 28th we saw significant jumps in the number of new page likes added to Facebook fan pages each day across most of the pages that we track. The phenomena is so wide spread that we are under the impression that it is a network effect, rather than artist related. We do not yet know why the metrics have increased so much, but will update when we learn more.

Update: It seems that increased click traffic on the "pages you might like" links from the homepage has pushed more Facebook users to artist pages across the network.

On Sunday, January 1st, artists across Vevo all saw a huge spike in their metrics. We're still looking into the cause of the anomaly, but can report that it is extremely wide spread and should not be considered an artist specific effect.

Starting December 23rd and ending around December 26th Wikipedia posted incomplete page metric files. The lack of reporting is true across almost all artists, and appears as a significant dip on the first day with some missing days and then back to normal by the 27th. As soon as completed files are posted, we will backfill the days appropriately.

Many artists, but not all, rebounded on the 28th with what seems to be the missing page views from the previous days. A significant spike on the 28th following the previous trough should be discounted as a network wide effect.

On November 26th, MySpace reported zero total page views for a large number of artists' profiles. The result is that when looking at the daily values, the graph will drop significantly and then spike back up to the expected values afterwards. The cause is most likely a MySpace front end counter issue, but this is unconfirmed. We will update when we learn more.

Between November 21st and November 29th Vevo experienced some server side failures and was unable to update the play counts for videos. As a result, the daily counts for all channels and videos on Vevo are going to be zero during that period. The problem has been rectified, but we are unable to backfill the data at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

Update: The issue is back. We're currently working on a better way to visualize the data to account for the consistent lack of updates.

For nearly all artists on November 20th, Facebook Insights incorrectly reported zero total page likes. As a result, the graphs are going to show a massive drop and then return in the days around bad data day. The cause for the error is unknown, but we will update when we learn more.

We've seen a substantial drop in the metrics reported by the Facebook Insights engine across many artists on Wednesday, October 12th. The reason for the drop is still a mystery, but the effect seems to be nearly universal. We will update when we have more information.

Update: It appears that as of Thursday the counts are back to normal for Facebook Insights, but the counts for Wednesday were not retroactively corrected, so the data will appear to dip and then spike around the day.

Due to internal maintenance, music video metrics failed to collect data from Tuesday the 6th to Friday the 9th of September. The outage will not affect your weekly reports. We're sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concern to support@nextbigsound.com.

Due to internal maintenance, music video metrics failed to collect data from Tuesday the 6th to Friday the 9th of September. The outage will not affect your weekly reports. We're sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concern to support@nextbigsound.com.

Due to internal maintenance, music video metrics failed to collect data from Tuesday the 6th to Friday the 9th of September. The outage will not affect your weekly reports. We're sorry for the inconvenience, please direct any questions or concern to support@nextbigsound.com.

On July 31st we changed the method of presenting Rdio plays as the sum of all songs associated to an artist to the sum of only the songs that are currently streamable on Rdio associated to an artist. As a result, the new totals are lower than the previous ones, and the change in plays on the transition day is a large negative number for may artists. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience, but believe the new values are more representative of an artists' traffic on Rdio.

We have stopped supporting OurStage as a network. OurStage fan counts will no longer be visible in graphs and OurStage profiles can no longer be associated to artists. If you have any questions or concerns, please direct them to support@nextbigsound.com

Due to changes in the MySpace page formats, we no longer support plays and views for any new MySpace profiles added to an artist. We apologize for the inconvenience and will update when this changes. All of the existing profiles will continue to have counts for both plays and views.

Update: It seems that view counts are being collected for new profiles, it is only play counts that are not being collected.

Our rate limit was recently reduced significantly for Twitter API calls. As a result, many artists will not have any twitter data for the past week. We are working with Twitter now to resolve the issue, and will update when we have more information.

UPDATE: We've been able to backfill the missing days for many of the twitter profiles in our system, but not 100% of them.

UPDATE: Our rate limits are back up, but there are still a few profiles with missing days.

On May 27th, we saw an unexpected number of YouTube profiles report zero change in channel views from the previous day. The volume was high enough that we expect it was a lapse in YouTube reporting, rather than the actual view counts for those profiles. As of May 28th, =ve seen the majority of those profiles reporting again within expected bounds.we

UPDATE (6/8/11): We saw many artists report unexpectedly low numbers or zeros over the weekend and beginning of the week as well, but many of the affected artist profiles have since recovered from the down time.

UPDATE (6/29/11): The behavior continues to pop up periodically and then correct itself after a few days. At this point, we are unsure as to whether YouTube is taking any steps to correct the reported view counts.

We saw an inordinate drop off in the play counts for many artists' vevo channels on May 24th. Most artists appear to have recovered from the drop off, claiming all of the expected plays on May 25th instead, and are back to normal now. We will update when we can explain the anomaly.

We've seen an unusual drop off in a number of artists' page likes reported by Facebook Insights on Sunday, May 1st. This drop off was not mirrored by the Facebook page likes that we collect outside of Facebook's insights engine. We're currently unaware of the cause of the metric drop, but will update as soon as we know more. Please direct any questions to support@nextbigsound.com.

On April 18th, JamLegend will stop accepting new registrations, on April 29th, the site will shut down entirely (http://blog.jamlegend.com/jamlegend-is-shutting-down).

At the end of this month, we will also be removing JamLegend as one of our supported networks. If you have any questions about this update, please direct them to support@nextbigsound.com.

Since iLike hasn't updated their data in several weeks, we are disabling the profiles across Next Big Sound. If you have any questions about this update, please send them to support@nextbigsound.com.

Some artists with MySpace profile pages that redirect automatically to "myspace.com//music" have experienced incorrect play counts over the last few weeks. We are currently looking into solutions with MySpace and advise to approach this data with caution as play counts may be exaggerated in some cases.

Update 4/6: The crawlers have been updated to account for the "/music" redirect pages.

Due to differences in collection time of Facebook fan page data between the Facebook Insights engine and our own, Facebook Insights new fan counts can lag a day behind our counts for some artists. When a lag occurs,

Vevo was unable to retrieve data from the YouTube API for several channels due to some changes in the YouTube API's system. Those channels have been unable to aggregate the YouTube counts each day, making the totals for those artists seem to stagnate starting somewhere in the second to last week of March.

In the past week, we've seen those channels update their total play counts to the expected amounts and resume normal behavior, but the changes are rolling. When those channels resume, the delta for that day will be an unusually high spike as all of the counts that would have come in over the lapsed period show up in a single day.

For an unknown reason many artists on MySpace experienced a spike in play counts on February 16, 2011. We're investigating the situation.

UPDATE: MySpace confirmed that there was an issue with the front end counters that caused a massive spike for a large number of artists. We are looking into a correction.

iLike fan count numbers have yet to updated for approximately 10 days. This stagnation has lead to a daily accumulation of fans of 0 for nearly all artists over that period.

Some Vevo videos have missing days. The reason for this is that there is a limit of 32 videos on each page of a channel, and we previously weren't crawling every page on a channel for data. The addition of new videos can push older ones onto new pages, so we would have stopped receiving data for videos that got pushed back. This problem has been rectified, but we are unable to fill in the historic data at this time.

At no single time, we've observed a strange phenomenon in Facebook page likes. On many dates a statistically significant number of artists experienced spikes in their number of page likes, suggesting that there was a Facebook specific event that happened, rather than any actual change in fan engagement. At this time, our best guess of the cause of the event is Facebook combining the counts from the various duplicates of artist fan pages in an effort we've dubbed page rollups.

Facebook Page Likes are reported to Next Big Sound two different ways: public Facebook data from their API and through user authenticated Facebook Insights connections. The former includes competitive artists and the latter includes a geographic breakdown.

Page Likes from public data and Insights have similar day-to-day values, but do not always match exactly. For the most part, values trend closely together, but for a handful of time periods there have been large discrepancies. Note that the Facebook Insights data matches exactly what is shown in the Facebook Insights dashboard. This reporting discrepancy is a known bug on Facebook's end, we will update when more.

On Apr 21, Facebook announced their new Open Graph API. This changed the language for Pages from "Fan" to "Like." According to their help center, "[Facebook] believes the change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested." Next Big Sound now uses their new Graph API and equates a Like on a Facebook Page to Fans of the Facebook has decidedly done the same on their own insights pages.

Many of our users have noted that metric values for their artists on Last.fm seem to have many missing or seemingly incorrect data points frequently followed by unusual fluctuations of seemingly impossible magnitude. While this may seem unlikely, it is actually due to the latency and irregularity with which Last.fm updates values for the metrics that we collect. This means that in most cases, the day to day changes for any one artist and metric will be nothing for several days followed by a large spike in value when Last.fm updates the value that we collect, reflecting the change over a period of several days as opposed to one day like all other networks. The length of this delay is unpredictable and varies by artist, and as such, we cannot adjust or normalize the data in any way that would make it more presentable or meaningful.

The structure of the endpoints on ReverbNation from which we collect daily data was changed. Because of this change we missed about a week worth of data points. The way fans are calculated was also redefined and for many ReverbNation users, this new definition can include fan counts from networks other than ReverbNation if the user chooses to do so.

As a result of this, the fan value for ReverbNation no longer reflect fans on only that network and we have stopped showing fan data from ReverbNation. However, the change in data structure does now allow us to track plays and page views specific to ReverbNation so we will be supporting these metrics going forward.

Wikipedia posted incomplete data files for the daily page views causing a large decrease in that metric for nearly all artists. Generally, we collect files that are posted every hour by Wikipedia and aggregate the results into daily changes over the 24 files that are posted for each day. On the affected days, only 2 such files were posted resulting in a substantial deficiency of data for that day