January 18th, 2010
Over the weekend we released a handful of updates to Next Big Sound. We’re now tracking a total of 15 services, profile editing is back in action, and we’ve made it a lot easier to login and signup.
Tracking 15 Sources
You can now track fan interactions on 15 services (that’s 10 more, and there’s another on the way!) across the internet. Our goal with adding more services is to provide a comprehensive picture of the quantifiable actions fans take when interacting with artists online. For a guide to what we track check out nextbigsound.com/#track.
We’re now showing the date we started tracking each network for each artist. On Britney Spears’ page if you look below the graph of her fans you’ll see each network we’re tracking for her fans along with the date we started tracking it.
The number of profiles we’re tracking varies depending on artist. Many artists we’re tracking don’t have profiles on all these sites, and in some cases we’re not tracking profiles that do exist. We’ve made it easy for anyone with a Next Big Sound account to add profiles or edit incorrect ones.
Edit Profiles
Above is the edit profile screen for the Lady Gaga. You can see we’re tracking 6 of her 15 profiles. Here you can edit and add additional profiles. The edits and additions go into a queue and are checked for accuracy.
New Login and Signup
A few areas of Next Big Sound require a (free) account to access. These include subscribing to email reports, seeing all-time graphs, editing profiles, adding artists, and verifying accounts. The new login and signup system make it so you’re automatically redirected back to where you started after you login or signup. Signup for an account here.
We’re Hiring
We’re growing our engineering team. If you’re awesome at manipulating huge amounts of data and building usable software send us an email.
December 1st, 2009
Artist stats and comparisons now load much more quickly thanks to a combination of an optimized database and some wizardry that keeps you on the same page while you search for new artists and comparisons. We’re going to continue to tweak and tune this system as more data is added.
Alongside the speed improvements come a slew of tiny changes including an explanation for why we ask about who you are on sign-up (it’s just for survey purposes!), real-number values on network breakdowns, and a a few other tiny changes.
October 20th, 2009
The other week we launched Verified Accounts and a discussion forum alongside a handful of minor tweaks to Next Big Sound. Read on to find out more!
Verified Accounts
Verified accounts are for artists and industry professionals representing artists. After verifying your account you will receive early access to new features, exclusive control over your artist profile URLs, and the verified badge on the artist pages you’ve verified.
It takes about a week to confirm verification requests and you’ll get an email as soon as your request is approved. Check out the directory of verified accounts at nextbigsound.com/verify/directory
Forum
Since launching Next Big Sound we’ve noticed similar recurring questions and email discussions that we thought could become more interesting and valuable if they were public. Our friends over at Vanilla make great open-source forum software that’s easily customizable so we created a custom Next Big Sound discussion forum. Check out the forum at nextbigsound.com/forum
We’re Hiring
We’re growing our small team by hiring two engineers. Know someone that you think would be great? Send them our way! Check out the jobs page at nextbigsound.com/jobs
Speed
From time-to-time the graphs and artist details are slower to load than we would like. We’re working on major infrastructure upgrades and other tweaks to the system to speed things up.
Thanks for using Next Big Sound!
