In tune Iomart wins major music software deal

IOMART, the Glasgow-based website hosting group, has won a contract to provide technical support to Musicmetric, the software business that tracks the online listening habits of millions of music fans.

Musicmetric's products allow record companies and artists to analyse the habits and opinions of fans, using text mining and web-crawling techniques to track more than 500,000 artists and eight million songs.

Iomart Hosting will manage Musicmetric's hardware assets at its data centre in central London in a two-year deal worth an undisclosed sum.

Sarah Haran, managing director of Iomart Hosting, said: "Analysing the online real-time buzz for anything, whether it's Amy Macdonald's new album or the latest video release from Lady Gaga and Beyonc, requires an absolute guarantee about up-time.

"There is little point in collecting data that is hours old, or that contains gaps; it has to be live and trending.

"(We're] delighted to be able to demonstrate to companies like Musicmetric that we (can] ensure a true, round-the-clock service."