The BBC Sound Index is a massive index of the hottest bands and tracks that are being talked about on the internet right now. Every 6 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.

All the demographic data they collect and use is entirely anonymous, so they can never attribute any age or location data to any specific person. So, if you are a user of any of these sites, you don’t need to worry that the Sound Index has any information about you. However, if you are concerned, or want more details, please contact us at soundindex@bbc.co.uk.

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. You can also watch some of the newest bands hottest new tracks on Sound, the music show on BBC every Saturday.

The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase, with data sources being finalized. During this beta phase they will also be implementing and tweaking the data currently in the Index, and investigating a weighting system, to allow the more active forms of interaction to contribute more heavily to the Index.