Musicians do battle with the Internet in one way or another every day.
Now that many have moved beyond piracy concerns as a primary issue, they are looking at how to increase page views, prompt virality, and stimulate interaction. The better part of action is knowledge, and one of the simplest, newest ways for artists to get more knowledge about their fans’ activities online is through the Next Big Sound, a site that tracks a lot more than just page views, digging a little deeper to display listens, likes, and adds.
Right now, Next Big Sound tracks plays, views, fans, comments, and other data for almost half a million artists across major properties, including iTunes, Facebook, and Twitter.
For those who need to grab data for multiple artists (hello, young record label social media intern!), NBS provides daily or weekly emails and/or RSS feeds.
The app doesn’t seem to show stats for specific tracks, so this isn’t the place to go to suss out your new single. And page views are tracked only for MySpace (a.k.a. the sad little website where bands go to die). Mentions on Twitter are not tracked, either.
But the greatest sin the NBS team commits is not including YouTube in their tracking of comments, favorites, subscriptions, and page views. Nowadays, YouTube is the new MTV; music fans will very often search for and listen to new or favorite music on that site rather than a music-only site.
Currently, the site is free, with no mention of premium options to be released.
The Boulder-based NBS team is part of the TechStars program there. We interviewed them on video about a month ago when they had just decided to completely change their site model.
