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Data-cruncher for music marketers

15-07-2014 12:39am

#1

Rucking_Fetard

Closed Accounts Posts: 1,260 ✭✭✭

Join Date: May 2014

Posts: 1106

https://www.nextbigsound.com/

It was 8 p.m. on a Tuesday evening and the Chapel, a popular San Francisco venue, was already starting to fill. Young hipsters elbowed past the fogeys idling in back to stake out a prime spot on the floor. As soon as St. Paul and the Broken Bones hit the stage, though, the diverse crowd was transformed into a seamless sea of screaming fans, singing and swaying to the Birmingham, Alabama, band's modern take on the soul sounds of yesteryear.

St. Paul's rise has been unusually meteoric for a band that didn't even exist until a year and a half ago. True, frontman Paul Janeway charms audiences between songs and delivers dance moves just awkward enough to be cool. And with Jesse Phillips on bass, Browan Lollar on guitar, Allen Branstetter on trumpet, Andrew Lee on drums, Ben Griner on trombone and tuba, and the well-known Al Gamble on keys, these guys know how to work a crowd. Even so, it was their first official tour, and here they were selling out weeknight shows on the other end of the country.

It all happened with lightning speed. In March, just after the release of their debut album, Half the City, St. Paul played at a South by Southwest showcase in Austin, Texas. A few days later, Rolling Stone proclaimed them one of the "48 Best Things" at the festival. Then came a review in the Guardian and an NPR story, followed by performances on CBS This Morning: Saturday and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. Soon their album was No. 56 on the Billboard 200. "I think we are all genuinely surprised. We were just, we were taken aback by it," Janeway told me. "It has been crazy. It has been a little—weird."

Alex White could have predicted it. Actually, he did. White, 28, is the cofounder of a company called Next Big Sound ("Making data useful"), which, as its name and slogan imply, uses computer algorithms to determine which musical acts are about to take off.
"We are making these predictions and drawing a line in the sand…It is sort of a mix of art and science."

Launched in 2009, and widely consulted by the mainstream music industry, the company crunches consumption data from social media and music-streaming sites, tracks buzz on Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, and YouTube, and collects private sales figures from clients and partners to inform its predictions.

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2014/07/can-next-big-sound-predict-future-music

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