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Our very own @omar711 writes about the data behind @lastfm's Best of 2011 http://t.co/4k4SCQsr

Earlier this week we released our Best of 2011 charts. 2011 saw you spend over 71 thousand years listening to music and scrobble more than 11 billion tracks. We’ve been churning through all of this data to find out what truly defined 2011.

New for this year is the discoveries chart. We went back to the beginning of time (well, to 2003) and checked every one of your 61 billion scrobbles to work out which artists were first scrobbled in 2011.

We’ve also broken these charts down by country and tag. Whatever you’re interested in, from experimental music in Mexico, the latest innovations in Finnish pop, or just what’s Big in Japan, you now have a means to browse them.

Following on from last year we are providing you with a data download. Musicbrainz IDs are now included in this data (where we have them) as part of our continued collaboration with Musicbrainz.

Producing the ‘Best of’ Charts is a very different process to our usual weekly charts. What follows is an overview of the process. In particular I’ll explain how we determined the new albums and discoveries of 2011, and how we turned these into the charts you see on the site.

New Albums

Our top artists are calculated based on albums released in 2011. One issue with albums is that they are typically released many times in many locations. To get around this we used a new version of the Musicbrainz database to find track listings for albums that were first released in 2011.

Of course, that isn’t the end of the story. Our library doesn’t always match up with Musicbrainz. Such issues need to be handled when we align album information from Musicbrainz with our own scrobble data. It’s one of the reasons we’re improving our Musicbrainz ID coverage .

New Discoveries

We label an artist as a new discovery if they were first scrobbled in 2011. As I mentioned previously, this can only be decided by checking through all of the scrobbles we have ever received.

This task is complicated by misspelled artist names, collaborations, and remixes. A nice example is Britney Spears’ collaboration with Sabi. Britney is certainly not a new discovery, even though this incorrectly-titled artist was first scrobbled in 2011. We avoid this by mapping artist names to their correct versions, before sorting through their scrobbles.

Our Human Computer

Our final step was to send the charts to our secret weapon: the music team. They pored through thousands of the top artists of 2011, matching them against their own databases and removing/adding artists that were incorrect or missing.

Data Download

This year we have two data downloads: the first – like last year’s – contains the top artists and albums of 2011; the second contains only the top artists, because they do not all have associated albums. In the data you’ll find all of the artists and albums from Best of 2011, along with play and listener counts, top tags, and image links.

In both cases we have added Musicbrainz IDs to the data. You can use these on our own API, BBC Music, and The Guardian. Use the data as you please; we look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Every year when Best of rolls around, we look at the chart to see if our data could have predicted who’d make it big. While there are a few in there we saw coming * cough * Adele * cough * the reality is that every year things get harder and harder to foresee.

That’s one of the reasons we launched our New Discoveries chart; to show off just how diverse your year in music really is.

Sure, it’s full of credible indie acts; Purity Ring, Death Grips and Work Drugs all did fairly well, while Wugazi – an album of mash-ups between Wu Tang Clan and Fugazi – made it to 13th place after getting huge buzz over the summer.

Someone we might have expected big things from was former Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher. He made it to number three on the New Discoveries chart, but only to 69 on the overall UK chart. That’s not quite as high as we might have expected. Similarly, Gaslight Anthem side project The Horrible Crowes made it to number 12 on the New Discoveries chart, largely off the back of Gaslight Anthem fans trying it out.

Further down the list GLaDOS makes an appearance. The Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory made it to number 7 on the chart after Valve released several albums worth of material from Portal 2. Soudtracks often jump to the top of the Hype Chart after hardcore fans flock to new releases, and while none of the artists on Drive were eligible for the New Discoveries chart they all got a huge boost when that came out.

Up until the last minute it looked as if the New Discoveries chart would be topped by none other than Rebecca Black. The “Friday” singer was number one on the chart right up until December, but while her video has collected some 17.5 million views on YouTube Last.fm’s music community only played the song 320,000 times between them.

Our first New Discoveries list is actually topped by Youth Lagoon, the project of Boise, ID native Trevor Powers. His dream-like album shot up the Hype Chart in autumn, and appeared to become a fixture throughout the winter for many listeners. He also creeps into the US overall top chart at 100.

For a taster of what these artists have to offer, listen to our New Discoveries playlist on the recently launched Discover app.

In case you missed it yesterday then our design team played with an early cut of our New Discoveries chart to create this neat little poster as a bit of a bonus. Don’t forget that you can also filter the chart to find the New Discoveries that best reflect your tastes using the Country and Tag options.

Here’s to another unpredictable year in music!

Last.fm Best of 2011 is here, as scrobbled by YOU. Full lowdown (and free poster!) here http://t.co/Csg2fLh1

Best of 2011 is a reflection of the year in music, highlighting the most popular and hottest new artists all based on the tracks you’ve been scrobbling.

This year’s ‘Top Artists’ chart was compiled by looking at scrobbles for albums released between 1st January and 31st December 2011. As in previous years, we aren’t counting live albums, greatest hits collections, EP’s and singles. You might not be all that surprised when you see who’s sat at number one, but dig a little deeper using our lovely new Country and Tag filtering options to find the No. 1 which suits you!

Another new feature for 2011 we’re really excited about is our ‘Top New Discoveries’ chart. This was compiled by looking at the number of listeners for artists who had their first scrobble between 1st December 2010 and 31st December 2011. Discovering new music is core to the Last.fm experience; so we wanted to highlight the artists who caught your attention this year and who you should keep an eye on during 2012. Again, use the filtering options to personalise your view.

Additionally, we took a look at the Year In Music to see what our data had to say about 2011. We hope you’re as fascinated as we were by the impact of music news on your scrobbles.

For developers, we have provided the chart data as TSV and XML files. Download and start hacking, we’d love to hear what you come up with.

Finally, as a little easter egg, we’ve created a commemorative poster of this year’s New Discoveries chart. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that it’s slightly different to what you see online; we made this before taking all of December’s data into account. You can download the poster here.

@harmen_h It's a little of both for different users, but clients built to guidelines should be caching scrobbles if they can't reach @lastfm

Some of you might be experiencing problems with @lastfm right now - we're working on getting them resolved ASAP. No scrobbles are lost.

@dtewfik Hey, DM us your details and we'll sort you out with a 12 month subscription ASAP.

And @dtewfik picks up today's subscription. You've got one more chance to win tomorrow before #bestofLastfm arrives.

Our #bestofLastfm chart is almost here! Before then you could win a 12 month subscription to @lastfm by telling us your top act of 2011.

All our services should be back and running at full speed now. Thanks for your patience!

A few of you might be having a problem with Last.fm Discover or our @spotify app - we're working on a fix for those right now.

@aripermantap Congratulations! You've won today's subscription. DM us your details and we'll sort out your prize.

RT @aripermantap: @lastfm Laura Marling with the album A Creature I Don't Know. Subtle but powerful lyrics encapsulated with beautiful m ...

@AkatsukiAckles Just reply to the tweet and include #bestofLastfm

Last chance to win a subscription to @lastfm this week as part of #bestofLastfm; just let us know your favourite artist of the year and why.

[Pour la version française, lisez plus bas!]

Last.fm has a mission: to find out what music you already listen to, so that we can recommend new music you will really like. So every time you listen to a track, we want to know – be it on Spotify, your smartphone, your iPod, your Xbox, iTunes or anything else that you play music on. We do this by letting all these websites, phones and devices “scrobble”. Scrobbling means that with your permission, we are sent a message every time you listen to a track.

There are already over 600 websites, phones, applications and hardware devices that scrobble, but we won’t rest until every single music player in the world talks to us! This is because we don’t want to miss any of the listening that makes your taste unique, and because the more scrobbles we get from all around the world, the better our recommendation system gets.

This is why we are very happy to announce that Deezer are now scrobbling. Their 20 million users around the world can now get our personalized music recommendations based on the tracks they listen to on Deezer, and by doing so participate in the great Last.fm project.

Setting up scrobbling on Deezer is easy: just click on your avatar on the top right, select “My account”, and then go to the “Alerts & Sharing” tab. Voilà!

We are really looking forward to working more closely with Deezer – we’ll keep you posted with any updates.

Happy scrobbling!

Last.fm a une mission: découvrir ce que vous écoutez déjà pour pouvoir vous recommander de nouvelles musiques que vous adorerez. A chaque fois que vous écoutez un morceau, nous voulons donc le savoir – que ce soit sur Spotify, votre mobile, votre iPod, votre Xbox, iTunes ou par n’importe quel autre moyen. Nous atteignons notre objectif grâce à ce que nous appelons le “scrobbling”: nous permettons à tous les sites web, mobiles et autre machines de prévenir Last.fm – avec votre permission! – à chaque fois que vous écoutez quelque chose.

Plus de 600 sites webs, téléphones, applications et appareils musicaux scrobblent déjà, mais nous ne serons satisfaits que quand tous les lecteurs media du monde nous parleront! Il y a deux raisons à cela: nous ne voulons rater aucun des titres que vous écoutez et qui forment votre profil musical; et notre système de recommandation musicale s’améliore à chaque fois que nous recevons un nouveau scrobble.

Voila pourquoi nous sommes très heureux de vous annoncer que Deezer vous permet désormais de scrobbler! Leurs 20 millions d’utilisateurs à travers le monde peuvent maintenant recevoir nos recommandations personnalisées basées sur les morceaux écoutés sur Deezer – participant ainsi au grand projet Last.fm.

Configurer le scrobbling sur Deezer est très facile: clickez sur votre avatar en haut à droite, choisissez “Mon compte” et ouvrez “Notifications & partage”. Voilà!

Nous avons hâte de collaborer de façon encore plus proche avec Deezer – on promet de vous garder informés.

A bientôt et bonnes découvertes musicales!

@CosmicBushell congratulations! You won yesterday's #bestofLastfm. DM us your details and we'll sort out your subscription ASAP.

We've got another chance for you to win a 12 month subscription to @lastfm. Just tell us your top album of 2011 and why #bestofLastfm