Next Big Sound shuttered, team to focus on Pandora AMP
Six years after it was acquired by Pandora, the music analytics platform Next Big Sound is shutting down.
In an email to users, NextBigSound.com said that it will go dark on November 1st.
“It’s been a wild ride,” writes the Next Big Sound team. “After 12 years of tracking music data across hundreds of thousands of artists and hundreds of billions of streams, it’s time to say goodbye to NextBigSound.com and transition our work generating valuable data-driven insight for the music industry into a new era focused on improving and expanding Pandora’s AMP tools.”
Pandora AMP (Artist Marketing Platform) has been the focus of the Next Big Sound team since soon after its acquisition and this is the final step of a multi-year transition into the AMP platform.
A New Era In Music Analytics
Next Big Sound was launched in 2009 and acquired by Pandora in May of 2015. Along with The Echo Nest (acquired by Spotify in 2008) and Semetric (acquired by Apple), Next Big Sound was a pioneer in music analytics gathering data from multiple streaming and social sources into a single dashboard.
But as Next Big Sound and its competitors were acquired, rival owners pulled their data from each other’s dashboards making the reaming analytics far less useful. Spotify was not about to share its data with a Pandora-owned or Apple-owned company, for example.
Today, music analytics is dominated by independent companies like market leader Chartmetrics and MRC that offer a wide range of useful data and drive a great deal of decision-making across the entire music industry.
Next Big Sound/Pandora AMP seems to have no interest in competing with these independent platforms even within the Pandora ecosystem. In fact, their dropping to the injection of all social feeds would seem to make viewing isolated Pandora data on AMP far less useful than just looking at in on Chartmetrics and other data dashboards.
Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.
