The iconic industry trade publication has been very generous with their coverage of Next Big Sound this past month featuring us three times in three weeks.
It all started with Glenn People’s column titled The New Equation.
“Everybody’s looking for the new equation,” says Alex White, co-founder/CEO of Next Big Sound, which tracks everything from YouTube streams to Last.fm comments. The Boulder, Colo., company received $1 million in funding last fall and is a graduate of startup incubator TechStars.
This article was followed closely by yours truly being selected for Billboard’s 30 Under 30 list. Billboard’s Power Players special feature 30 Under 30 recognizes rising young executives who are driving our business forward with their artistic and business vision. It is an incredible honor to be mentioned alongside 29 other amazing music industry stars.
Lastly, Next Big Sound was named as one of the 10 best digital music startups by Billboard Magazine. Unfortunately the content is behind a pay-wall but the link points you to the Hypebot coverage.
Before I leave you I have one shameless plug. It would mean a whole lot if you’d spend time to vote or comment on our panels for SXSW. One of them is already a trending panel with zero promotion, let’s get ‘em both there – voting ends Friday so do it right now!
So thanks to all who have helped us get this far and thanks for the congratulations on all the recognition! We couldn’t be more excited to show you what we’ve been working on.
People like to try things before they spend their hard earned money. By measuring the lower friction actions associated with checking out a band online (vs. paying for the CD or MP3) we have noticed that artists appear on our radar before they go on to traditional measures of success.
In March of this year we published our SXSW Charts. We put the 2,000 bands that played in Austin during SXSW into our charting algorithm (an acceleration function) to see which bands added the most online activity across all the networks we track over the four days of the music festival. Our charts were picked up by Mashable, Billboard and several other publications and four months later the artists on top of our list have already gone on to some big things.
Fang Island – number 3 album on iTunes, tour dates with Flaming Lips, Stone Temple Pilots and headlining gigs in the UK and Europe.
Neon Trees – Number 1 track on Billboard’s Heatseeker charts in July.
XV – Last week the Kansas City rapper was signed to Warner Bros. Records.
Buried in the billions of data points we collect lies The Next Big Sound. So who’s next?
Someone in the music industry once told us that there is a “terrible coldness to all of this data.” This came as a surprise since we talk to artists, labels, managers and others in the industry all day, listen to music every possible second we can and talk about hot new bands as soon as we find them. We’ve never felt very far removed from the music but I realize that someone spending 30 seconds on Next Big Sound might think that our graphs remove the love and magic of an incredible band or hit song.
That is, until you take a minute to understand what our charts represent. Each day millions of people are interacting with thousands of bands in hundreds of different ways online. Type any artist into nextbigsound.com and hover over any point on the graph. It may say 4,235 new plays or 800 new fans. It’s important to remember that each number represents real music lovers and that behind each number is a real human interacting with an artist or the music directly. There is nothing cold about that.
Last month we introduced the ability for verified account holders to track individual YouTube videos. Starting today we’re opening up this ability to everyone.
We’ve long offered the ability to track the number of subscribers, channel views, and favorites for any artist’s YouTube channel. Now you’ll be able to track the play counts for any video associated with an artist. Watch the 30 second screen cast above on how to add YouTube individual videos.
One year ago Next Big Sound started indexing social music data. At the time it was a small quantity — 2,000 artist profiles across three networks.
We publicly launched two months later with a focus on rapidly increasing the numbers of bands and networks in the system. Today we’re proud to say we’ve grown to 712,000 artist profiles across 16 networks and have collected well over 1 billion points of data.
We continue adding more bands, profiles and data every single day and as the majority of music-related activity continues to migrate online we intend to capture it all…
Two weeks ago Todd Zusman became a full-time addition to the NBS engineering team. Back in February while Todd was finishing up his senior year at the University of Michigan he sent us as an email along the lines of “You’re awesome. I’m awesome. We should work together. My resumé is attached.”
The only problem? He forgot to attach his resumé. It didn’t matter though, as the man behind scaling the tech for Text From Last Night we had a feeling he’d be able to handle any challenge we could throw at him. In the past few weeks he’s done exactly that. We’re happy to have him join the team even despite his horrible, horrible mustache.
We’ve long offered the ability to track the number of subscribers, channel views, and favorites for any artist’s YouTube channel. Now you’ll be able to track the play counts for any video associated with an artist. Watch the 30 second screen cast above on how to add YouTube individual videos.
Not verified yet? Visit nextbigsound.com/verify and verify your account to enable individual YouTube video tracking.
At Facebook’s F8 developer conference we attended this year Mark Zuckerberg announced that “Become a Fan” buttons on pages from ABBA to ZZ Top would be switching to “Like” buttons. The official reasoning was that the Like button was a more frictionless way for people to establish connections with things they had affinities for. A confidential Facebook email obtained by ClickZ claims the switch is for better targeted ads as users have been using the Like button almost twice as much as the old Become a Fan button.
We’ve been fielding calls all week by managers and labels trying to understand the spike in Facebook fans they were seeing for their artists. Facebook prompted everyone to turn the bands, books, tv shows listed in their profiles into official connections through the Like functionality. Thus the spike was most pronounced for artists that people had listed in their profiles (i.e. Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan) as compared to newer artists like Paper Tongues whose debut album went top 10 on iTunes in April and didn’t see a spike in Facebook fans at the end of April.
We ran the numbers for the hundreds of thousands of artists we track for the past 30 days as compared to the 30 days prior:
Average number of Facebook Fans artists added in April = 2,909
Average number of Facebook Fans artists added in March = 819
Average percentage change = + 255.2%
It will be interesting to see if this is a one time bump from prompting users to Like all the bands listed in their profiles or if the Like button really is more effective for getting people to become a Fan. The truth will lie in the data.
Next Big Sound is hiring a front-end developer to spend the summer interning with us. The position can be paid or for course credit, is in Boulder, CO, and will last for 10 weeks. You’ll work on Next Big Sound’s various products and your work will be used in production.
About you:
- excited about writing standards-compliant HTML and CSS.
- enamored by webkit and CSS3.
- the first time you used jquery you went “woah” — now you’re a pro.
And more about you if you’re really awesome:
- know your away around Photoshop and have some attractive designs to show.
- know usability is more than a buzzword.
- comfortable with mvc & github.
- hate pie charts.
About us:
- venture backed start-up that takes pride in our quality products.
- fast moving. we come up with an idea at breakfast and it’s live by noon.
- focused.
- also hate pie charts.
For the third installment of MySpace’s Introducing program the four artists selected are Taio Cruz, AM Taxi, Delphic and Janelle Monae. “Introducing…” is a MySpace initiative to present new artists to the social network’s online music community. Past artists participating in the program include NeverShoutNever and Jason Derulo, both of whom went on to score top 25 hits.
It’s unclear how the artists are selected for the program but with 3 of 4 artists in this showcase having over a million profile views and Taio Cruz riding the smash radio hit “Heartbreaker ft. Ludacris,” it seems like they are selecting artists with at least a moderate level of success. In looking at the above graph of Views to their MySpace and Wikipedia pages you can see that Delphic and Janelle Monae saw a jump in activity in January and that Taio Cruz has seen sustained attention since last fall when his album, Rokstarr, was released in the UK. As you can see from the chart below he’s really started to pick up steam around the re-release of the album in the US last month (March 10, 2010).
