SONG CONTEST BLOG

The internet has made it dead simple to test anything and everything when it comes to your music.  Six music analytics startups are aiming to help you make informed decisions – rooted in data, not a hunch – about who you should market your music to, where, when and how:

Band Metrics

RockDex

Next Big Sound

GigsWiz

Musicmetric

SoundOut

MySpace disabled its auto-play feature last month in a bid to save $10m/month in streaming fees.  Next Big Sound reported on the impact this move has had on the number of overall plays on the site and, interestingly, how “the number of streams MySpace reports is no longer inflated by auto-play and is more directly impacted by true fans listening to their favorite songs.”

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Quit your day job.  Start a label.

Next Big Sound have changed their tune.

I first heard about the startup through a New York Times article a colleague forwarded to me back in December last year.  At the time, Next Big Sound had developed an interesting role-play model where fans could take the A&R hot seat and pick “the next big sound” from a music discovery platform of independent all-sorts.  I wrote about it here.

Last week, Techcrunch published a post about the company revealing a brand new look and approach.  Next Big Sound overhauled every aspect of its website to deliver a sterling business intelligence platform for fans and music pros.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a stout supporter of business intelligence solutions for music ? there is no shortage of marketing services for musicians yet very few accessible tools for artists to perform their due diligence before attempting to promote their message.

This move brings Next Big Sound to the starting line with two other players I’ve been following, BandMetrics and RockDex.  All three have developed similar products but Next Big Sound stands out with a super clean interface and clear call-to-action: free weekly email digests with statistics on any artist/band you wish to track.

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SoundOut

Marketers use focus groups to determine the consumer attitude toward a new product before millions are poured into launching it.  It is a form of qualitative research and practiced by companies of every size and discipline.  Focus groups are designed by experts, require considerable resources and take time.  However, the core principle of acquiring pertinent feedback in order to improve a product or arrive at a solution for a problem before “the damage is done” can be effectively applied on a much smaller scale, if done right.

I caught up with the General Manger of SoundOut, James Sopper, this week to find out how his company has brought the value of focus groups to artists and labels through a cost-effective and intuitive online platform.

James, please tell me a little about your professional background, how you got involved with SoundOut, and your role at the company.

I graduated from Imperial College in London with a Masters Degree in Aeronautical Engineering about nine years ago and, pretty soon after that, I took on the role of Technical Manager for a triple World Speed Record campaign.  After a good few years of speed-sailing and many days spent on frozen lakes in Canada, I began working for a large US medical company as a project specialist and it was while I was there that I was introduced to David, CEO of Slicethepie, by a mutual friend.  After speaking to David at length about the new business he’d spent the last year setting up he invited me to join the team (I say “team” although at that stage it was four desks and a foosball table set up in what was formerly a school classroom!).  Three months later, in mid June 2007, Slicethepie was born.  Since then, I’ve been leading various strategic projects behind the scenes at Slicethepie, the latest and by far the biggest being SoundOut.  My current role is SoundOut General Manager and I’m tasked with day-to-day operations as well as pushing forward with new developments, features and improvements .

What is SoundOut’s core offering?

SoundOut’s core offering is Consumer Insight and Analytics sourced directly from music consumers.  We take a whole stack of blind reviews of your track (both numeric 0-10 ratings and written text reviews), crunch the data for you and present the results in an easy-to-read report.  We report on things like gender bias for the track (whether guys like it more than girls for example), age bias and whether there was a consensus of opinion on the track or whether opinion was divided to name a few.  We also analyse the text reviews using some very clever processes built for us by CFL Software Limited which pull out the key themes mentioned in the reviews – things like “heavy bass line” or “long intro” – and let you know the overall sentiment behind those themes (whether they were thought of as positive aspects of the track or whether those elements let the track down).  I guess the main difference to other sites is that the reviews submitted to SoundOut are blind; the reviewers can’t choose which tracks they review and they aren’t told the name of the track or artist until after they’ve submitted their review so the artist gets genuine, anonymous feedback.  We also do a lot of analysis on the actual text used in the reviews which is revolutionary.

When did you launch SoundOut and what has the response been like to date?

SoundOut was launched on January 13th 2009 so it’s really only been about five months since launch.  The response has been great so far but what’s really surprised us is the number of SoundOut users who have come back to order more reports.

What is the relationship of SoundOut to Slicethepie?

They’re sisters!  All the reviews for track submitted to SoundOut are collected via the Slicethepie Scout Rooms.  There’s a huge army of music fans out there who have dedicated a lot of time to reviewing music on Slicethepie – SoundOut simply taps into that knowledge and experience.

How do you propose that the artists/music promoters who order a report from SoundOut leverage this data to meaningful, career-advancing opportunities?

That’s the million dollar question!  SoundOut reports are being used by large number of music professionals for various purposes – everything from radio station programmers drawing up playlists to labels as a pre-A&R filter and, of course, the artists themselves.  So I guess it depends on what you want, for example, the age and gender information from a SoundOut report can help an artist decide which radio stations are the most appropriate ones to send demo tapes to.  I won’t go so far as to say that a SoundOut report is going to open doors for you but it will give you a little insight as to which doors to go and knock on first.

A report from SoundOut is certainly nice to have… but is it a “must have” in today’s climate?

I’d say that in today’s climate, information is a “must have”.  Gone are the days of just seeing how many “friends” you can get to add you as you can on MySpace – bands need genuine feedback from people who listen to music just as much as record labels, radio stations and music supervisors.  It’s no secret that the majors have been using market research and focus groups for years but the costs associated with these were always beyond the reach of all but the biggest marketing budgets.  SoundOut offers a credible, reliable, fast and cost effective solution to bring this kind of data to aspiring bands and indie labels.

What success stories, if any, have you recorded to date, attributed to the use of SoundOut?

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and seeing as SoundOut is only five months old it’s still too early to tell for sure.  I can tell you that a number of artists have put entire albums through to help them determine which single they should release first – those albums are due to be released later on in the year so it’ll be interesting to see what conclusions they draw from their reports and how those relate to the decisions the artists themselves have made.

What can we expect from you in the near future?

We’ve got some pretty big plans for SoundOut and are putting the finishing touches to some really neat new features.  The accuracy of SoundOut has attracted a lot of attention and because of that some of the stuff we’ll be releasing later in the year will help artists monetise their music and access new markets… so stay tuned for more updates!  As always, if anyone has suggestions, comments or ideas, then please feel free to email me at info@soundout.com

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iLike, the hugely successful consumer-facing extension of the not-so-hugely-successful indie artist community, GarageBand, announced its further investment in self-promoting artist tools for iLike registered artists, specifically the marketing and syndication of music and music-related collateral across several social networks.  The 300,000 member iLike artist community will now be able to automate their feeds to Twitter, synchronize their YouTube channels to their iLike accounts, add an ‘up-selling’ widget to their MySpace concert listing, and include an iLike ‘music tab’ to their Facebook profile… and this is just the very tip of the ice-cream: iPhone apps, content syndication tools, premium artist stats, own web-domain management and many more flavours. 

iLike is a powerhouse, catering to 45 million music fans across its network.  This investiture will undoubtedly put some pressure on small players such as BandMetrics and RockDex who focus on statistics for artists, and ArtistData who focus on content syndication, to offer value features that iLike can’t or simply chooses not to.  And in spite of ReverbNation’s exponential growth and market lead on the indie artist front, iLike enjoys an unmistakable advantage: primed access to consumers en mass.

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Bandcamp Stats

Bandstats.  I don’t care what it’s for.  I just wanna play with it.  Gimme.

About Bandcamp.

Related Posts: Bandcamp and Creative Commons, Rockdex, Band Metrics

If content syndication and distribution is the hottest topic on this blog at the moment, then music metrics is a close second.  Over the weekend, I played with a new service I read about on Hypebot called RockDex.  More like Google Alerts than Google Analytics for measuring music buzz, the free point-and-shoot service leverages the API’s of several social networks to measure an artist’s volume of mentions on Twitter and Blip.fm, content on YouTube and Flickr, and fans and listens on Last.fm and iLike, producing a score out of one hundred for each category.  Third-party ‘how-to’ recommendations are placed strategically next to each score in an effort to help the artist raise his social buzz and, in turn, score on RockDex.  I am not quite sure how useful or even representative this service is.  I am guessing that it is intended as a snapshot of a broader service to come or marketing collateral for Music Arsenal, the company’s paid web-based CRM solution for artists and record labels, reminiscent of ArtistForce.

Band Metrics is a data analytics and decision support system for the music industry, helping its users define and learn about their target audiences.  The system gathers pertinent data about artists and displays manageable statistics and assumptions for its users’ insight, application and marketing advantage.  For instance, Band Metrics will provide feedback about an artist’s presence on a variety of social networks which, in turn, can be applied to target promotional campaigns and isolate the areas where the artist may more effectively invest his resources.  Currently in private Beta, interested parties can apply for an invitation to test the site.  I’m waiting for mine.