Last weekend I was fortunate enough to take a trip down to California to attend the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. For those of you unfamiliar with the festival, it’s a giant three day festival that brings together over 150 musical acts and bunch of art installations. I mainly went for the music, which this year featured headlining acts such as Kanye West, The Strokes, Kings of Leon, The Black Keys and The Arcade Fire. I had the most amazing time while at the festival, but couldn’t help but notice how many people there were constantly on their smartphones and tablet devices, so I decided to see if those people were using social media to talk about Coachella while they were there.
Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I performed a search for the word “Coachella” over the past week. Our activity summary shows that there were over 21,600 blog posts, 4,200 news articles, 10,700 forum posts and 217,000 tweets mentioning Coachella.
A look at the overall popularity of talk about Coachella in social media showed that popularity peaked on the final night of the festival. This is most likely due to people talking about the weekend they had just experienced, as well as a phenomenal performance that night by the rapper that everyone likes to talk about, Kanye West.
Because of the fantastic line-up of bands and artists performing at Coachella, I had a feeling that music blogs would be writing about it all weekend. I didn’t expect to find over 21,000 posts though. On top of that, a look at our geo-location map shows that bloggers from all over the world were writing about the three day event.
I dug deeper into those 21,000 blog posts to find out what the bloggers were writing about. I thought that looking at our entities chart, which pulls the most popular people, places and things from posts, would give me a good idea of which artists were being talked about the most. Kanye West seemed to be the most talked about artist from the festival, but we can also see artists such as Wiz Khalifa, Death From Above 1979, The National and Duran Duran were getting a lot of attention. More interesting was that Vampire Weekend also seemed to be written about a lot despite the fact that they didn’t actually play the festival. However, their lead singer, Ezra Koenig, did come out to do a song with Chromeo and that seemed to gain a lot attention. Something else I found interesting was that Nike seemed to show up a lot, so I dug into why and it turned out that bloggers were writing a lot about the new Nike shoes that Kanye wore durring his performance aptly dubbed the “Nike Air Yeezy 2′s”. This was the first time the shoes were seen in public.
Over on Twitter I found a lot of conversations going on about a lot of the same artists that were being talked about on the blogs. I could also see through our buzzgraph that people were sharing their pictures, videos and experiences on Twitter through sites such as twitpic.com and tumblr.com.
Lastly, I decided to see what the traditional media was saying online about Coachella. By pulling up our word cloud I could see that media was talking about the same things as well, but with much more of a reporting feel. This is evident by seeing words that referenced the “stage”s, “crowd”s, “time”s and “songs”. Again though, I found that all of the talk revolved around the “music”.
Overall, I had a great time at Coachella and it seems that I wasn’t the only one judging by all the talk going on in social media from a world-wide audience.
Tags: coachella, MAP, music, Social Media
I think I read somewhere there were a bunch of people annoyed with a few people who whipped out their tablets and recorded an artist’s set. I know a lot of Coachella purists turn their noses down on people on their smart phones and are more concerned with looking good than the line up.