Next Big Sound

Next Big Sound (NBS) was a New York–based online music analytics company that measured the popularity of musicians across social networks, streaming services and radio. Its platform let users track mentions and follower activity for bands and artists across services such as Last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, iLike and Twitter, graphed those statistics over time, and benchmarked an artist against comparable acts. The company described its product as measuring daily music consumption and purchase decisions worldwide, combining artist activity from social, streaming and video sources with contextual information for music industry decision-making.

The company began tracking data in June 2009 and at one point reported analyzing over 486,000 bands. It served customers ranging from individual artists to global major labels, licensed two charts to Billboard magazine, and in 2014 extended its approach beyond music with a Next Big Book division and a partnership with Macmillan Publishers. Following Pandora's 2015 acquisition, the team increasingly focused on Pandora's Artist Marketing Platform (AMP), and the Next Big Sound platform was retired on November 1, 2021, after what the team described as 12 years of tracking data across hundreds of thousands of artists and hundreds of billions of streams.

Founding story

Alex White co-founded Next Big Sound in 2008 during his last semester at Northwestern University, together with David Hoffman and Samir Rayani (a fourth co-founder, Jason Sosnovsky, later parted with the company). The idea came from an entrepreneurship class assignment in which students pitched venture capitalists, resulting in $25,000 of seed money. White had worked at Universal Records and run the production company at Northwestern before starting the business.

Business model

Next Big Sound operated an analytics dashboard sold to music industry participants, from individual artists to global major labels, and licensed chart products (two charts to Billboard magazine). Under Pandora it also supplied data to partners including Billboard, MRC Data and Chartmetric.

Sales of analytics products to artists, labels and industry clients, together with chart licensing to Billboard.

Traction

The company reported analyzing over 486,000 bands and, at shutdown, cited 12 years of tracking data across hundreds of thousands of artists and hundreds of billions of streams. By early 2012 it had grown to about 10 employees with two global major label deals and two charts licensed to Billboard; Wikipedia lists 23 employees, and the Pandora-era team was described as about two dozen people.

Latest developments

Next Big Sound announced on October 1, 2021 that NextBigSound.com would go dark on November 1, 2021, the final step of a multi-year transition to Pandora's Artist Marketing Platform. Social media data was not carried over to AMP and the Pandora Predictions chart was retired, with users pointed to Chartmetric for social data. Track-level reporting was already available in AMP, programming notification emails moved to AMP, and the Pandora charts Top Spins, Trendsetters and Top Thumb Hundred continued.