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?
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.
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.
We just launched a playable chart of the fastest rising artists at SXSW. The list is sorted by how quickly artists are adding fans across their social network profiles. It’s up at nextbigsound.com/sxsw.
Last week Eric Czech became the first addition to the NBS engineering team. Beyond Eric’s ability to quickly complete super-human amounts of work, make databases go super-fast, and optimize every last bit of code, he brings an uncanny ability to forget the location of where he parked his car.
Eric has been working with NBS for the past few months on a handful of smaller projects and we’re excited to have him join us full-time in our Boulder, CO office. He’s currently working with Samir and Walter on our backend infrastructure and database optimization to make NBS sing.
We are back in Boulder after roughly three weeks on the road meeting with labels, managers, bands, agents, and music tech companies in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. We are more excited about what we are building and where we are headed than ever before.
We want to take a quick minute to highlight The Founders series shot this summer by Megan Sweeney. Here is a trailer of the series Megan posted this morning.
Megan’s artful encapsulation of the Techstars experience was elevated by the excellent music used throughout the video series. While the episodes profiled the entrepreneurial and business side of our lives, it did not capture the concerts we went to all summer, the music that is constantly blaring in our office, or the constant conversations we have around the future of the music industry and our favorite up and coming artists. A couple of the bands whose music was used in the series we’ve had the pleasure of seeing live and meeting in person.
The music really made the series unique and we want to highlight the artists themselves (that we are, of course, tracking in our system). If you are writing original music and looking for exposure you should contact Megan at Alpine Light Pictures.
So one last thanks to the Techstars teams and mentors for an incredible 3 months, thanks to Megan for capturing and presenting it to the world, and thanks to the bands for providing the soundtrack for the summer!
Last Thursday around 8 AM we launched nextbigsound.com. A few hours later we presented at TechStars’ Investor Day at the Boulder Theater to a packed house of mentors, investors, and the Boulder community. It’s crazy to think that so much has happened in the three short months we’ve been here.
The morning of August 6th we lifted the need for an invite code on nextbigsound.com and enjoyed traffic from a bevy of tweets, Read Write Web, and TechCrunch. Thank you to everyone that’s tweeted out a link, reached out to us via email, or provided feedback. We’re thrilled with the response.
The current site is the core of the product, and we have a clear vision of where Next Big Sound is going. We’re excited for it to evolve.
It’s hard not to sound like we’re gushing when we talk about TechStars — honestly, it has been the greatest experience our team has had together. It totally transformed our business and gave us a stable platform of mentors, advice, and resources to launch from. On a personal level, we learned a ton from the brilliant people who surrounded us, made some great friends, and fell in love with Boulder, CO.
Vanilla founder Mark O’Sullivan says it well in his post TechStar For Life where he talks about the friends he’s made: TechStars is all about the people, and what great people they are.
The mentors that TechStars has attracted proved to be the most valuable part of the experience. Whether they were answering questions on the super technical details of system architecture, providing key introductions in the music industry, or helping practice for investor day, their guidance was stellar.
Running a twitter search on TechStars reveals a ton of blog posts and mentions of investor day and the program in general. Sifting through these provides a pretty accurate take on what the last few days have been like. I can’t say it enough, the community here is awesome.
And with that, a big thank you to the TechStars mentors with whom we worked closely, the extended network of mentors that provided help, the excellent staff at TechStars, and the greater Boulder community. It’s been an amazing summer, and the Next Big Sound is really just beginning. I look forward to what the future holds and can’t wait to meet next year’s crop of TechStars teams.
Yesterday we started the private beta of the new nextbigsound.com. We’ve been testing the site since it’s very early stages with a great group of people that have provided awesome feedback and it’s at a point now where we can let more people in while we refine the product and make sure everything is stable.
We haven’t talked too much about what we’ve been building this summer at TechStars, and until we fully launch we’re going to keep relatively quiet. With that said, the current sign up page pretty much sums things up, “Actionable Intelligence for the Music Industry”.
If you’re in the music industry and interested in helping us test the new site please email us or make repeated attempts to guess the invite code.
TechStars ends for the summer in 10 days. It’s amazing how quickly it’s gone and I apologize for not keeping this blog updated more regularly. We’ve been heads-down working on the product and talking to customers, but as soon as we’re out of beta expect a lot more updates.
Also, the video series ‘The Founders’ is a weekly webisode documentary style show on everything happening at Techstars that’s followed our journey all summer. It’s a pretty great look at both TechStars and Next Big Sound. A new episode is coming out today at noon and you can watch past episodes at techstars.org/thefounders.
