Going over the 10 startups that were profiled by guest author Don Dodge yesterday on the occasion of their TechStars 2009 ‘graduation’, Next Big Sound to me seemed one of the more interesting ones and I wanted to take a closer look at it. Basically, it’s a statistics and comparison engine à la Alexa or Compete, but for music artists and industry professionals.
And while I think that’s inherently a good idea, there are a couple of flaws in the system that put a downer on the experience. I’ll explain.
What Next Big Sounds aims to be is a place where you can go to see how fans interact with music online, virtually in real time. Look up a music artist, say Manu Chao, and you’ll get a nice overview of how many ‘plays’ his music is getting on his MySpace, Last.fm and iLike profile, measured by week, month or all time. Wanna see how many fans your favorite artist has on any of those sites or other services such as Facebook and Twitter, how many times one of his accounts was viewed and how many comments it gets? No problem, click the corresponding tab and you’ll see a nice graph representing the evolution of all these elements.
Also a neat feature is that you can subscribe to any given artist in the NBS database and get fed RSS items or e-mailed alerts with updates on all that is measured. Furthermore, much like Alexa and Compete for website traffic, you can do comparisons between artists and bands, enabling you to track their online evolution in comparison with others.
A couple of gripes. When you sign up for the service, you can opt to register as a fan, an ‘industry professional’ or an artist but nowhere does NBS specify what the difference is. I signed up as a fan and set out to get some basic statistics on bands that I like, and quickly noticed that Next Big Sound’s database is currently too far from complete to be truly useful.
I did a search for a band I like called “Blackbox Revelation”, which yielded zero results, and trying my luck with electro dance sensation “Justice” there were multiple options yet the service failed to tell me which would be the right one to pick. YouTube isn’t tracked at all, and neither are services like Rhapsody and Pandora. Finally, it would be cool if Next Big Sounds let you check the online activity centered around individual tracks or albums instead of merely the artist’s name.
Overall, I think it’s a great idea and I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve in the future, but for now it’s clear that the service requires some extra work and polish.
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this company should think hard about how they could participate in music promotion 2.0…because this is just after-the-fact reporting on the core problem: Discovery. Either there is an authentic, deterministic way to successfully promote new/existing music in today’s world or MUSIC, in general, IS DISPOSABLE.
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That’s because the band is called ‘The Black Box Revelation’ , which name does return results
Great article Robin.
When you published this they were a little over 24 hours since going live, so bugs anyone seeing should be forwarded to the team or mentioned to their @nextbigsound twitter.
They are tracking just under half a million bands right now (with obvious plans to add more and more). I’ve found some pretty small local bands. Not everyone is there, but it is growing.
Pretty fun to play around with, I can’t wait for them to roll out some of their advanced features.
I had the same thought from the article – the product is merely a day old in the public eye. It will grow with time.
This looks great guys. Congratulations on the launch.
I am sure this will get a lot better quickly over the next few months. Definately one to watch.
I’m not sure how this data really effects every day life? How does it differentiate between 10 users with 10 plays or 100 users with 1 play? That is the type of data that would be beneficial not an overall snapshot. If the size of bands were all related to how many MySpace “friends or plays” they had it would be a much different landscape than reality.
A site like this was already created and shut down by those companies whose “plays” were being counted as proprietary data. So they either have a reputable paid source for the data, or it’s entirely user generated…otherwise, they’ll probably be shut down too.
The music industry is full of nooks and crooks. See me reveal the industry’s dirty secrets at musicgremlins.com
Whats interesting with the next big sound is their focus is directly on providing value to band managers and artists to help them make solid decisions on where to spend time and money.
As a mentor to NBS, it has been wonderful watching them take their previous idea (http://www.tnbsound.com/), basically walk away from it the second day at Techstars, and focus on building this new product.
As @andrewhyde said, its a baby of a product, they are quickly iterating ideas, and are looking to do some really interesting things with twitter, youtube and others.
At the end of the day, the value of a product like this is in its ability to provide the music industry with something it doesnt have easy access to…actionable data.
I share your excitement, Robin, in watching them continue to grow!
Maybe you should talk to Big Champagne, most of the industry in the know uses their data. This seems more like a consumer interface with no real impact.
At this early stage, I can’t say I really see the value in a service like this. Unlike compete and other web measuring tools, you are looking at data which can’t be found directly.
Plays, Friends, etc. can be found by going to the artists myspace, facebook, ilike, last.fm pages.
Now, for a band to know where most of there fans are, they have to have account on those sites already, which they are maintaining.
As a band, is having this data consolidated a real value?
As a fan, i’m not sure how I would use the data.
However, as often the case with data, store it now, and find a use for it later.
They should explain why they ask fan/artist/industry, but I’m sure it’s for targeted advertising down the road.
Hey, so with this, a last.fm subscription, and a spotify subscription, I should be set to go into the dangerous world of music exploration.
How in the world are these guys going to make $$$? Sure the site looks great, but its free. So is it going to be advertising (yawn)… advanced features you pay for, sorry there will be very little demand for that. Oh wait, its like facebook, its like social networking… it’ll make money later.
I love how these young technically talented kids get all this attention. VCs fawn all over them and in reality they have absolutely no idea how to generate revenue. Did we not see this movie 10 years ago… did we not learn?
It seems all that was learned is that these young startups should not spend millions on offices, computers etc. Nowadays that does not happen, but VCs still roll the dough out (in smaller quantities) for things like this.
Perhaps if these young kids were taught how to bootstrap a company to make it on their own they would be more inclined to learn how to make it profitable versus teach em how to woo a bunch of dumb VCs, who then give them some cash and see what they can do with it.
The Web 2 world is just as dumb as the Web 1… just considerably toned down.