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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The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company developing a range of powerful open APIs for savvy developers to tap into in an effort to make their online music services analyze and convert data into meaningful musical discoveries for their users.  The Echo Nest’s approach to “understanding” musical attributes and matching this information to consumer-facing musical properties is as much an innovation in technology as it is in concept.  Fans of Pandora, Last.fm, Jango and other streaming playlist services will appreciate the game-changing experience such applications provide – the almost flawless and automated comprehension of musical characteristics such as tempo, key, and time signature is mind boggling – and the recent partnership with Spotify, the streaming music service making the most waves at the moment, is testament to The Echo Nest’s music acumen.

Now, the Somerville, MA, based operation has unveiled an inspiring new service affectionately dubbed Fanalytics.  The solution, in this case, addresses a very real pain in a manner that’s easy to stomach: musicians and music marketers need to reach the most likely music authors, bloggers, and journalists to publish something about them – Fanalytics will search for and identify the most relevant points of contact.  Why is this valuable?  Because sorting through 30 million bloggers or so on the net to find just a handful willing to promote you is an impossible task, even for the seasoned media pro.  Furthermore, while the 3 million plus musicians out there along with their managers, agents, and pluggers pursue placement in just a handful of high-profile media sources, Fanalytics digests a tail of smaller, more obscure sources that their aggregate coverage may serve more exposure than that of a single, prominent editorial in, say, Rolling Stone.  Whether that’s fact or fiction in practice is, in my opinion, over shadowed by the gallantry of attempting to build technologies that connect more music makers with more music writers with more music fans.

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