The Next Big Sound founders found themselves in a tight spot on the eve of joining the 2009 TechStars class. As the trio of founders set out on their drive from Chicago to Boulder to begin the thirteen week curriculum, the founders knew they no longer wanted to pursue the idea with which they had applied to the incubator program. Co-founder Alex White explains, “We were accepted to TechStars based on the idea of creating a site that was similar to fantasy sports for music,” essentially offering users the chance to be their own music mogul. While White still believes the original idea has promise, with a year of work behind them the team felt it might prove challenging to create “a siloed destination site.” Thus, the team arrived in Boulder without a clear vision for the future – and anxious about whether TechStars would accept their uncertain change of direction.
The second concern would resolve itself quickly when TechStars Executive Director David Cohen assured the team early on that the program had placed its bet on the founders rather than a specific idea. But even after clearing that hurdle the team still needed to settle on a specific idea. White notes, “We had several ideas in the music space but didn’t know exactly what filled the best need in the market.” After a couple weeks on the ground in Boulder, the team eventually struck upon the idea of providing data to the music industry reflecting activity transpiring on the new social media platforms.
Despite the great migration of music and its consumers online, the analytics available to industry professionals remain firmly rooted in a pre-internet age, largely cemented by the twin metrics of radio plays and physical album sales. The NextBigSound has created a website that allows users to track key digital media metrics for bands – online views, plays, fans and mentions from several sources – in a clean graphical interface. The company expects to offer standard data on its site for free and charge band managers and record labels for more advanced capabilities. White sees extensive revenue potential as the company begins its deep dive into analytics that help to understand the cause of the data. White notes, “By far the most common response from band managers [after looking at the graphical data] is to point to a large increase in plays and ask ‘What happened there?,’” which is a question the company believes it can answer on a profitable basis.
The team’s composition is largely what allowed them to change course and go from idea to product in the course of a summer, with each co-founder bringing a valuable skill set: White is comfortable as a front man and brought music industry experience, Samir Rayani brings deep technical expertise to handle the large volume of data, and David Hoffman has an eye for design to make data accessible. White also attributes the speed of execution with the mentors available in the TechStars program, including Micah Baldwin of Take Comics, Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group, and Tom Higley of Iggli. Another key aspect of the team’s agility is reaching out early and often to its potential customers by way of a weekly conference call with several band managers. White explains how these conversations kept development moving quickly: “We spent a lot of time creating really nice looking PDF reports the first week and upon sending them out to band managers we got little in the way of response. During our calls the next week we heard from our customers that they most frequently access information from PDAs that can’t display PDF– so simple emails providing the most important data are actually more helpful. The next week when we did that, we had immediate responses.”
It was announced in September that The Foundry Group of Boulder, CO, had recently closed an initial round of investment with the upstart firm. Jason Mendelson, Managing Director at Foundry, offered the following on the firm’s blog: “In our conversations with record companies and band managers and our ongoing involvement with Topspin, it has become apparent to us that the industry is craving data, metrics and reports that take into account the next generation of music consumers.”
In the near term, Next Big Sound has plans to increase the number of data sources it tracks from six to thirty and the bands it covers from around 500K to 5M. While this is accomplished, the company continues to publish an active blog to introduce band members, mangers, and marketers to the metrics of new media. In offering counsel concerning both general social media and specific tips related to the music business, White ends a recent post with the advice, “All of this falls apart if your music doesn’t move people.” But as the company itself proves, he also might have mentioned that the next flash of genius can happen at any time.
