The Top Brony Musicians of December 2013

[Freewave 1,145]

 

With season 4 starting up and 3 years of brony music in existence we have a rare opportunity to see who the top musicians of our scene are. Using the youtube subscriptions totals of each musician we (the brony musician directory) have put together a ranked list of the community. While there's plenty of great musicians under 1,000 subs we wanted to thank those who've done a great job of getting noticed and putting out great music for the community (and that's where this list begins at). Here's the prior list from 6 months ago. How times have changed!

If you see anyone over 1,000 ytube subs who we have missed (which is very possible) let us know in comments and we'll add them to the list when we get a chance. We also divided the list into alicorns, unicorns, and pegasi to make it interesting.  Anyone with ** after their name does more than just music so may have a sub boost there. PMV artists are not included. Musicians who have left and deleted their youtubes or their catalogs have been dropped but have an honorable mention at the very bottom. Remember that popularity is not the same thing as quality and that there is no reason for being butthurt over the brony community's favorites.
 

 

The Big List

 

Your thoughts? Hopefully quite a few musicians for some to check out that they may have missed the first time around. Some new faces but many familar ones too at the top.

 

One other things to note is that with this list is that we are also launching our news site for BMD and MLR now: http://fimmusic.tumblr.com/ 

 

Please check it out as we need all the followers and support we have to keep a weekly blog for music active and worthwhile. If you like brony music and want to know what's happening in the community we urge you to check it out and subscribe. There's plenty of great music out there, big and small.

 

Thanks

[Carbon Maestro 1,003]

A lot of stuff going on here and looks to me more like using Youtube subscriber counts as a measure for top brony musicians.

While I think the list is quite interesting and how cool it is to see an actual youtube number comparison much in the way like socialblade, I think wording it as a "Top Brony Musicians of 2013" is IMO a bit iffy.

 

There are a few things that can skew the statistics such as the fact that electronic music tends to get far more subscribers than traditional, and many have non-music related material that can earn tons of views. It's nonetheless a very interesting list for statistical purposes though and I would rather call it a list of , "Most Subscribed Brony Musicians" list as opposed to "Top," unless the list is opinionated.

[Freewave 1,145]

Top is always a bit of an ambiguous term. I could have used popular, influential, or subscribed but they'd be just as much the same type of information passed really. In the end while its a bit a popularity contest and that's where top kind of comes into play. As you said with many nonmusical ventures skewing the results its hard to truly compare apples and oranges and EDM does continue to rule the roost. It's funny too how many of the top musicians have left the community and yet continue to have growing subscriber counts and not retracting ones.

 

But the BMD Top Musician list one of the few times people really get to see who's getting noticed the most, who's shooting up, who's left, and hopefully whom people haven't and need to check out if they havent yet. A chance to take it all in and say "wow". Just to make 1,000 subs is a tough hill to climb but it gets even steeper when you realize how much more higher the mountian goes and how many people are really up a different level of popularity then the rest.  But I hope that people see this as more of an interesting statistical list rather than as something that's a competition or a call for popularity over quality.

[Carbon Maestro 1,003]

Well I like the idea of statistics, and I was wondering if there's some sort of code that allows a website to automatically update the subscriber count by using a 'Get Subscriber Count from a User' akin to what is explained here:

http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/14078-youtube-subscribers-counter-solved/

Just a thought that might help your little site a bit more, if it's going in the statistical direction.

[Freewave 1,145]

Well I like the idea of statistics, and I was wondering if there's some sort of code that allows a website to automatically update the subscriber count by using a 'Get Subscriber Count from a User' akin to what is explained here:

http://www.computercraft.info/forums2/index.php?/topic/14078-youtube-subscribers-counter-solved/

Just a thought that might help your little site a bit more, if it's going in the statistical direction.

 

Ohh thanks Carbon, that looks a really cool script. I'll have to see if i can get it to work to i can alleviate a lot of the manual work. We added the links to the appropriate BMD profiles this time around so that should make it a lot easier and functional too (for us to get to their youtube quickly and the user too).

 

By the way I saw your youtube commentaries for

and

 

And love what you did there. I'm hoping to throw them on fimmusic for those who havent seen them as they are still rather relevent and well worth watching. Are you thinking of doing anymore of these? It's those type of opinions and shout outs i'd like to see as part of what we do on fimmusic if you're up for any guest commentaries.

Edited December 7, 2013 by Freewave

[Bronies are cool 30]

Idea!!!!! Ok, my idea will likely be shot Soren but ima throw it out anyway. What if when wanting to do "top brony songs of January", you made a profile on soundcloud called "Top Brony Songs of January" and people submitted it to (who ever is in charge of submitting the music onto the profile named "Top Brony Songs of January") then, because it is all on one profile, the play count would have minimal bias from already-made-fans by a musician. The songs will then collect plays for a month which could be used to determine who has te most plays and likes and reposts. You could do a math calculation (likes/plays) to determine a score. Add that score to the following equation (reposts/likes) to determine a final score. This could then be used to determine who has some of the greatest music if the month (according to the name of the profile that we make). It sounds a little more fair because people who have 100 fans would be able to compete with people who have 2000. People who have 100,000 or so fans probably won't participate. But that is okay because it would leave room for more underground artists like myself. Who knows of it would work? We could only predict right now, but we could advertise this on EQD and on various forums to get this going like this forum, MLR, and some other brony forums. We could try it a few times if we get a good response from people as well. What do ya think?

[Freewave 1,145]

It's an interesting idea. There is a Bronies group on soundcloud that basically IS the biggest brony music group i know of that almost everyone submits to. You could technically go back and look to see what the favs (hearts or thumbs up,i forget) at the end of the month  from submission through the month and maybe get interesting statistical results but you'd have to be vigilant on following a schedule of checking everytime you flip your calendar and do a ton of manual work. Then again a lot of well know musicians use soundcloud so those could wipe out any lesser known musician. BMD already does a playlist every month (i gotta do November now, lol) of who the EQD spotlights were and those kind of show off the wide variety in views of each. Honestly though I'm not a fan of highlighting music solely on popularity as i think the more interesting music often misses out on the popular votes. While a Top Songs of the month is a cool thing to check out (and getting it from different sources like pony.fm, soundcloud, ytube votes via sabrespark) is something i'd still like to do i think getting lists and posts from various other musicians of what floats their boat in a given week (what they heard and liked) is just as informative and often a bit more genuine.

Edited December 7, 2013 by Freewave

[Carbon Maestro 1,003]

 

 

And love what you did there. I'm hoping to throw them on fimmusic for those who havent seen them as they are still rather relevent and well worth watching. Are you thinking of doing anymore of these? It's those type of opinions and shout outs i'd like to see as part of what we do on fimmusic if you're up for any guest commentaries.

 

I might be making a list of the top remixes and top VAs/Singing VAs, and as for review I'm trying to get some started on analyzing individual songs but I haven't had the time to because of school and I also like to compose music too. . .

 

I do have my own personal list of my picks for the top 25 brony songs of 2013, which has the "one song per musician" rule and original songs only (no remixes or covers):

 

Usually when I review a song, I do make sure that the song does have at least 1000 views just to be sure that the song is somewhat notable and not totally unknown, and so some people know what I'm talking about.

 

As for "Top" whatever title goes here, I'm not sure what to do next. I kinda want to review the top background pieces from the show, but other than that I don't know if I have any more ideas.

 

 

 

. It sounds a little more fair because people who have 100 fans would be able to compete with people who have 2000. People who have 100,000 or so fans probably won't participate.

To answer this, I personally think it's not fair to not include people with over 100,000 fans if their work is actually well mixed and mastered. I find that the best musicians do have at least some sort of fanbase and I never encountered an instance where a really good musician has under a hundred fans.

Most of the musicians I encounter usually have some experience with music outside of the MLP fandom and this is key. Notable exceptions are Makkon who's started composing because of the fandom. But those who start after joining the fandom unfortunately have a marginal chance of being noticed.

[Freewave 1,145]

Yeah I'm really glad you "threw down the gauntlet" early in terms of getting musicians to highlight their favorite tracks of the year. Seeing what other musicians really enjoyed is key to getting a wider perspective of what the fandom has to offer. I hope those on MLR and outside of here do top 25 or 50 lists themselves to add to the chorus.

Edited December 7, 2013 by Freewave

[Carbon Maestro 1,003]

 

 

I hope those on MLR and outside of here do top 25 or 50 lists themselves to add to the chorus.

 

A bit optimistic, I must say, but I do wish you luck. Because nowadays, the musicians that I work with have become more egocentric about brony music in general, saying things like, "I have A music, but most of the brony musicians have songs that are C songs." I'm not expecting other bronies to put out their own lists considering that they probably haven't really thought about it like I did (I honestly made the list just because the 2012 popularity list by EFN was just ridiculous. One musician with 10 songs in the top 100? 9 other musicians aren't good enough for the public?).

 

Like I said in the video description, these weren't necessarily my favorite songs (though most of them are), but I went on the route on musicality and technical stuff.

[Freewave 1,145]

Well even if it's optimistic (it is, i tried to do the same thing on mlr last year and got little replies) its nice to see someone caring to put out a list given with some thought put into it. It is getting harder and harder to point out to what's relevent in the community as we're getting a big difference between the pop and edm stuff thats not particularly interesting musicially but fits into memes or pop music cliches and comes from well knowns and the stuff thats very interesting (Cherax, AdamtheWalker, Soldat, SGAP, etc) but often loses out to the average brony. If we even get a couple thought out lists like yours it shows that people are still listening and caring about their peers and whats released (even while most people aren't doing the active listening that they did when they joined the community).

[Bronies are cool 30]

I honestly really want to try to revamp the music part if the fandom. Like a hard core revamp. I think we would need the help of EQD for this one, but I wanna help do something to make the music part of the sommunity a popular thing again. (I am assuming that it was once a very popular thing for bronies) I think that there should be a single official mlp version of monstercat. One that doesn't die shortly after being made, one that doesn't support crappy, crappy music. We should contact EQD to make an official announcement to see if already existing ones would like to merge into a single group. I know we would probably not have enough good musicians to do an album monthly, however, we could try to do an album release every two months. We coul plan out the details later, but I want to get something like this going. For real, something that would last.

 

And we would not release the music as soon as we start, we would save it up until we have at least a month or two of songs lined up so we have a decent to strong start.

I just know that this will help get people more fans and will probably help the community as a whole for a little while. Also, it wouldn't have to all be electronic music, but would have all genres like orchestra and rock as well. I only said monstercat to give an example of a group. It doesn't have to be only electronic.

[Freewave 1,145]

Was interesting to see EQD's recent ackowledgement of issues specifically within the mlp music fanbase. Hopefully the feedback they get helps steer to some positive changes so they don't promote slop but also don't shut out the door on new talent. MOTD makes it much easier to get featured which is the first step but i see the amount of people making the spotlight drastically dwindling (only 25 in november from about 3 times that the year before) and motd quality control to be perhaps a little TOO lax. Honestly taking out a lot of the pino (pony in name only) out of the community would help as i'm so tired of the random dubstep and edm created with absolutely no reference to the show. It's pointing back to the show that makes it pony and when newer musicians don't get that it waters down the music that we get. Instrumentals are FINE but you gotta explian the relation in your description and SHOW that influence in the music itself.