Pandora shuts down Next Big Sound for good
Farewell to Next Big Sound – the team behind the music tracker tool will now focus on Pandora AMP instead.
Pandora-owned music analytics platform Next Big Sound is shutting down from November 1st 2021.
The music data tracking tool has been running for 12 years but has been slowly phased out, absorbing into Pandora’s free Artist Marketing Platform.
In a blog post the Next Big Sound team said: “This is just the final step of a multi-year transition, and our team is excited to focus on improving and expanding the awesome marketing tools and data-driven insights available in Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform.”
Why has Next Big Sound closed down? When the Next Big Sound music analytics tool was bought by Pandora in 2015, Pandora’s rivals like Spotify removed their data from the dashboard for competition reasons. Of course, this made the available data less broad and not as valuable for users. Pandora seemingly isn’t going to try and compete with more powerful data tools like Chartmetric.
Pandora stressed that there’ll be little practical impact on artists. Track reporting is already available in Pandora AMP and being expanded to give deeper insights into where in the world people are streaming your music. Streaming data will still be passed over to Billboard and Chartmetric, and Programming Notification Emails will make the move over to AMP.
Next Big Sound social media tracking is also shutting down, along with the Pandora Predictions chart. Artists can use Chartmetric instead to see rising artists on social media. Pandora said: “We’ve decided to focus our team’s efforts on giving artists valuable, actionable insights to help them grow and monetize their fan bases on Pandora.”