BBC introduced a music indexing service last week, called Sound Index, which, in every six hours, 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. This information is used to make the exclusive Top 1000 Sound Index. So Sound Index is a music buzz index controlled entirely by the public. The Index can be filtered by you to create the Index you want, you can also tailor it to represent the views of people of different ages and locations.

Currently, the top 10 artists, according to the data processed in this service of the millions of comments, posts, plays and views of different users of Bebo, MySpace, Last.FM, iTunes, Google and YouTube:
1. Britney Spears / 2. Mariah Carey / 3. Leona Lewis / 4. The Kooks / 5. Rihanna / 6. Chris Brown / 7. Madonna / 8. Scouting for Girls / 9. Linkin Park / 10. Usher

This Index is currently made up of 19,911,037 comments, posts, plays and views. The Sound Index is currently in a public service beta phase.

BBC is also collaborating with IBM and uses IBM's Semantic Super Computing to crawl and analyse our partners' sites to create the Sound Index. The discography and biography information is sourced from Musicbrainz, a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site, and Wikipedia.

Visit Sound Index!