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).
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.
Thousands of people subscribe to free Next Big Sound email reports. Today we sent out our first batch of reports with an entirely new look. They’re now easier to read and have more information.
If you don’t already receive NBS email reports you can subscribe to any artist by clicking the star next to their name.
