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.
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.
January 13th, 2010
I got a call from one of my friend’s at Sony last week: “Your data for Susan Boyle is wrong. There is no way her numbers are that low.”
I could hardly believe it myself.
Her album, I Dreamed a Dream had come out at the end of November and was still the second best-selling album of 2009 behind Taylor Swift’s Fearless. In six weeks Susan Boyle has moved well-over 3 million units. I Dreamed a Dream topped the US-based charts and shifted 136,566 units for the week ending January 3rd yet in that same week she added little more than 4,000 Fans across all the networks in our system! Her daily play count on MySpace is typically in the hundreds! By contrast, the #2 selling artist of the week, Lady Gaga, is streamed hundreds of thousands of times a day on MySpace.
The major labels are amazing at the marketing, distribution and promotion of a story and artist like Susan Boyle. The people who watch Britain’s Got Talent and buy physical units are not the people that friend bands on Facebook or stream their music online. The shift in behavior is well underway.
We will NEVER see another new artist with such a lopsided physical/digital distribution. We live in transitory times.
January 4th, 2010
I love the end of the year music lists. I’m currently fighting my way through a dozen or so lists going back and covering all the albums I somehow missed or didn’t spend enough time with.
So open up the tabs, put on your headphones and start soaking in the best music from the past year. And what a year it was.
2009 saw the launch of Next Big Sound, the close of our financing round with our dream list of investors, our first outside hire and lots of exciting conversations and partnerships in the ever-changing music industry. We are hard at work developing the tools to help the industry measure, understand and prosper in the online music world.
2010 will be a BIG year for us.
December 16th, 2009
As part of the ongoing series of A Band’s Guide to Surviving Online we’ve explored Twitter and now turn to last.fm.
What is Last.fm?
Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website founded in 2002. It claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. In May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for $280 Million USD.
Last.fm allows users to download a program that tracks the music they listen to on their computer and sends the play data back to Last.fm. Thus, data from Last.fm incorporates plays from people’s iTunes and iPods via a technology called “Scrobbling.”
Getting Started:
- Your band might already have a last.fm page. Once an artist has had a track or tracks “scrobbled” by at least one user, Last.fm automatically generates a main artist page, even if there is no music available for streaming on the radio.
- Bands must “claim their page.” Ideally you can get last.fm/music/your+band+name
- Make sure any user generated information and links are correct. Customize your page with your band logo, colors, bio, photos and videos.
What to do with an Account:
- Make sure to upload your music so your songs will be available for streaming through the radio.
- Last.fm is an extensive site. Make sure there is content for each section: biography, pictures, video, albums, tracks, events, news, tags, listeners, journal
- Pay attention to how people are tagging your band and start using that language to describe your sound.
- Watch which songs are played the most use this information when deciding which songs to send to radio, put on your profile pages, shoot music videos for etc.
- Find similar bands and see how they present themselves on Last.fm.
- Join groups and actively participate in the conversation threads
- Shouts are like comments on MySpace, make sure to respond to each and every one!
- Using their PowerPlay functionality you can buy exposure to fans who like similar artists to you.
- Include links to your other social media sites.
December 8th, 2009
I interned at Universal Records in the Motown Sales division the summer of 2005. One day that sticks out in my memory was when we were trying to decide the optimal street date to release David Banner’s record. Even then the industry was hungry for data to make these sorts of decisions. At that point all we had readily available was SoundScan numbers and terrestrial radio plays.
The Ying Yang Twins had just released USA (United States of Atlanta) and seen sales take off on the strength of The Whisper Song on urban radio. David Banner had a similar song, Play, seeing good pick up across the country. Knowing the overlapping demographics of their fans we wanted to time the release of Banner’s Certified album to hit the same point in the radio trajectory as the Ying Yang Twins had done.
I was in charge of creating the pretty Excel chart that my supervisor wanted to present to the label heads. I can only imagine how much longer it would take to put a similar chart together by hand nowadays. There are more data sources out there than ever before. The trick is knowing the right comparisons to make, which metrics are important, and being able to present it in a way that tells a clear story.
