Stay On Top Of BIGSOUND's Most Hyped Acts With This Awesome Website

With something like 150 acts scheduled to perform in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley precinct at next week's BIGSOUND showcases, it's understandable that punters might be feeling a little overwhelmed about their options across the program.

Fortunately, Brisbane-bound delegates still unsure as to where to park themselves to catch the best and brightest of the event have a secret weapon up their sleeve in the form of BIGSOUND Buzz, a new website built by the brains at digital-and-creative-services company Bolster in an effort to push their creative team "to come up with something and really challenge them to make something unique," co-director Alex Zaccaria tells The Music.

"We've been working on BIGSOUND all year, doing the branding and digital strategy for it, and we just kind of had gone for the last five or six years, and just love going there, so we figured, 'Let's do something to make it a little more interesting and see what we can pull out from socials', and we figured we'd challenge our creative team a bit as well, and see what they could come up with," he said.

BIGSOUND Buzz has three display formats — a pie chart (in the form of a spinning record) and bar graph, both of which can be alternated, and a permanent leader-board down the left-hand side — to convey the results of its buzz rankings, which themselves can be broken down into measurement periods of the previous six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours or seven days. The Bolster crew worked on the program for "about six weeks, on and off" in-between projects for other clients, building the program completely from the ground up.

At the time of writing, emergent Melbourne electronic luminary Braille Face is the most-buzzed-about act of the past six hours, no doubt aided by the release of his incredible debut album, Koya, today, with Jack Grace and Gooch Palms taking #2 and #3 respectively. The half-day rankings already show the difference six hours can make, with Oh Pep! the most-talked-about act of the past 12 hours, with Mallrat and Braille Face just behind; and the past day has been especially kind to Tkay Maidza, Oh Pep! and Jack Grace.

Impressively, Tkay becomes the first act to top two buzz charts in a row, sitting atop the 48-hour rankings too, just ahead of Vera Blue and Japanese Wallpaper, while Tigertown are the buzziest act of the week, followed by Alex Lahey and Japanese Wallpaper.

Zaccaria explains that, in order to compile its data set, BIGSOUND Buzz scrapes the Facebook and Twitter feeds of relevant acts to determine who is nominally dominating the digital discourse.

"It's Facebook and Twitter only; we can't get Instagram because of the limitations of their API," Zaccaria explained. "So it's Facebook and Twitter only, and it basically looks for the mentions, it basically ranks and adds weighting based on volume of posts, how many followers or Likes the person who posted has, or how much engagement, comments, Likes etc on the actual post.

"We're hoping it's kind of just a cool thing for the bands, managers and anyone else throughout the conference to gauge who they want to go and see and who's buzzing, but we will be using it together with some infographics and insights and analysis post-the festival about how the top 10 came to be, where they rose from and … those kinds of things."

As it turns out, BIGSOUND is just the beginning for Bolster's plans, with Zaccaria explaining that the company has plans to utilise the Buzz platform at next year's South By Southwest event in Texas, as well as other major events in the future.

"We'll definitely roll it out for South By Southwest, in a similar kind of capacity, and then we're planning in terms of commercialising — so we might use it with a comedy festival or film festival to kind of gauge ... what shows or sessions are buzzing the most," he said.

BIGSOUND Buzz is available here. BIGSOUND itself will be held in Brisbane next week, from Wednesday 7 to Friday 9 September. Its conference component has sold out, but tickets remain for the live component at which you'll be able to see the bands being ranked by BIGSOUND Buzz; see the event's website for more information.