Have you seen this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/soundindex/

"The Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now.

Every six hours the Sound Index crawls some of the biggest music sites on the internet - Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube - to find out what people are writing about, listening to, watching, downloading and logging on to. It then counts and analyses this data to make an instant list of the most popular 1000 artists and tracks on the web. The more blog mentions, comments, plays, downloads and profile views an artist or track has, the higher up the Sound Index they are. So, the Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public."

With consideration of accuracy taken into account, I think thats a brilliant idea.
Nice one.

Brilliant idea EXCEPT...

when you log on and check it, it's frighteningly predictable with the old Mariah, Leona etc crap dominating and virtually nothing surprising.

It's the old problem of market research - it FOLLOWS the trends and never sets them.

So if you want to find out what went on last month, great.

But if you want to find the next thing, you need to have that basic ability yourself.