August 2nd, 2010
(photo via just.Luc on flickr)
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?
July 19th, 2010
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.
May 6th, 2010
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.
March 31st, 2010
Shakira has had a surge in Twitter followers this past week to cross the impressive One Million follower mark.
I noticed she was a treading search term and after some quick digging saw that it was recently reported that she has spent years in therapy to help her deal with her body image. This confession was superceded by her revealing plans that she and long-term boyfriend, Antonio de la Rua, plan to “think about starting a family” once she wraps up her world tour in 2011 in support of her latest album, She Wolf.
While the bump in Twitter followers was likely due to these swirling rumors – not surprisingly, neither of these admissions were broadcast to her Twitter followers.
February 18th, 2010
(photo via afagen on flickr)
Multi-million dollar, multiple album deals were fairly commonplace during the CD boom. The gambles and corresponding payoffs were necessarily much bigger when it costs $500,000 to rent a studio, hire a producer and make an album (let alone the cost of pressing the record, shipping it and stocking it in stores across the country!).
I think the structure in the music industry is still recovering from this system and remains far out of whack. Large advances from labels, publishers, etc. are still a regular occurrence. In our age of fragmentation this makes no sense. Recording, manufacturing and distribution is no longer prohibitively expensive. The scarcity is in attention; and attention can be measured. It is easy and cheap to measure engagement, growth and popularity online at a small scale. Artists can record a couple songs, make a video, blast out the content and watch how people respond while keeping their day jobs. There didn’t used to be an intermediate step. Either you could afford to record your music through the help of a record label, or you couldn’t.
The resources for artist development in the future will not come from large corporations but from artists who have managed to write and post material that has connected with an audience, however small. The artist service companies that will survive will be the ones that use their development resources to increase the exposure for artists once the initial promise of the artist has already been proven on a small scale.
February 8th, 2010
Views: The Who
We started tracking Wikipedia page views in January. While there are certainly dedicated sources for learning about bands and musicians, All Music Guide being one of my favorite, people overwhelmingly turn to an artist’s Wikipedia page for biographical information and sociological context.
As the above graph shows, people turned to the free encyclopedia before, during and after The Who played at half time of Superbowl XLIV. Their Wikipedia page recorded nearly 700,000 visits on Sunday, typically that number is more like 10,000 visits a day.
I thought The Who delivered a strong performance, especially compared with the lackluster effort of Springsteen and Petty the previous two years. Unfortunately, we don’t have historical data to see how Wikipedia page views spiked for Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Prince, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, or the infamous “Wardrobe Malfunction” in 2004.
PS: add/editing Wikipedia URLs is now enabled for all artists in our system.
PPS: we’re still hiring! Check out the jobs page for more info.
February 6th, 2010
As part of the ongoing series of A Band’s Guide to Surviving Online we’ve explored Twitter, Last.fm and now turn to Facebook.
With over 400 million members Facebook has long surpassed MySpace as the number 1 social networking site in the world.
Getting Started:
- Registering for Facebook is quick and easy. Make sure you register a Fan page (as opposed to a Person page).
- Ideally you can get facebook.com/yourbandname
- Facebook has a standard look and format. Your picture, bio, info, links, videos are the main areas to customize.
- Upload your own content, music, standard biography etc. Include links to your other social networking profiles.
What to do with an Account:
- The main focus of the Facebook page is the Wall. This should be a steady and entertaining stream of status updates, relevant links, videos etc.
- Status updates should be meaningful updates on the artistic process (i.e. writing a new song, in the recording studio etc.) or career (i.e. free show this Saturday, check out this article etc.).
- Right now Facebook has a subtle music player. Make sure to upload your songs via the Facebook player or embed using a third party application like ReverbNation or iLike.
- Once your page is populated with music and information, send out an invitation to all of your friends to “become fans’ of your page.
- Make each of your band members administrators of the account and have them invite their entire network.
- Find similar bands and see how they present themselves on Facebook.
- Make sure to respond to each and every wall post, comment and thank your fans for their interest and attention.
- Facebook provides data about the geographic and demographic information of your fans. Because most people on the network have put their real information into the system, this is a high-relevance source for learning more about your fan base.
February 1st, 2010
The Grammy bump is a well known phenomenon in the music industry whereby major winners at the award show see an understandable spike in sales the following week. The results are still coming in but we fully expect to see a similar lift in artists’ online activity this coming week. I was especially curious about the new artist category that Zac Brown Band won last night.
Fans: Zac Brown Band The Ting Tings MGMT Keri Hilson
Keri Hilson, MGMT and Silversun Pickups [not pictured] saw no noticeable change in fans but from looking at the graph you can see that Zac Brown Band and The Ting Tings both saw a big increase on the day. In fact, The Ting Tings saw an even bigger lift even thought they didn’t win the category.
I was also curious to see how people responded to the performers last night. I thought that Taylor Swift sounded out of key, the CBS censorship interrupted a powerful performance by Drake, Lil Wayne and Eminem, and that Dave Matthews Band gave one of the most respectable performances of the night.
According to our data, the public disagreed. Taylor Swift was the runaway winner in terms of “fans added,” totaling 80,000 fans on January 31st – 4x what she normally adds in a day. Also interesting to note that most of these fans were added on her Facebook account.
Fans: Drake Taylor Swift Green Day Lady Antebellum
January 29th, 2010
I hate when people use Radiohead‘s In Rainbows online release as an example of new music industry models. Radiohead is a product of the old major label system. The system that, for years, understood how to take unknown artists and turn them into superstars. Radiohead was priority one at Capitol Records where they had the marketing, team and of course the talent to get them to the top. As for In Rainbows, because they were the first big artist to do the “name your own price” they also generated mainstream press and PR beyond any exposure they could have purchased. Finally, their manager said “This was a solution to a series of issues, I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”
It’s kind of like startups all comparing themselves to Facebook and Twitter. These companies are aberrations. And while we should follow and understand how they’ve been able to thrive, trying to apply their lessons to every online startup is often useless.
January 22nd, 2010
You probably heard about the special election this week in Massachusetts where Republican senator-elect Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the heavily Democratic state. You may have even heard his victory speech Tuesday night where he joked that his daughters, Ayla and Arianna, were “available.”
While Arianna is not available, Ayla Brown most certainly is benefiting from the exposure. She was a candidate on American Idol four years ago and has continued singing and recording under Double Deal Brand Records. In the past week her online activity has jumped over 6,000% across the social networks in our system (albeit she was averaging under 30 plays a day the days leading up to the election). She is making the rounds on national media, her album debuts next Tuesday, and she’s apparently been bombarded with date requests.
The best laid marketing plan could never have driven this level of interest. It’s now up to Ayla and her team to turn the awareness into engagement.
