Pandora’s Next Big Sound has made all artist data open and available to anyone. Until now, Pandora data was only visible to the artist, label and their team. “In an industry where stream counts are an important measure of an artist’s success,” writes Next Big Sound senior product manager Dan Wissinger, “the inaccessibility of this data publicly has meant that Pandora’s important role in many artists’ career trajectories has gone unnoticed.”
Starting today, Releases, Reach, and Engagement sections of the profile will show Pandora metrics like Radio Spins, Interactive Plays, Thumbs Up, and Station Adds for every artist on Pandora and each of their tracks. Those same metrics are also available to Next Big Sound users in email notifications and Weekly Report emails for artists that they follow.
Pandora Data vs. Spotify Data
Illustrating the importance of multiple data points and Pandora in particular, Wissinger runs through data for Lil Donald. The Atlanta rapper who’s been around since 2014 is now having a breakout year. Wissinger shows how Pandora data can differ from Spotify data.
“You might have looked him up on Spotify and seen he’s got about 250,000 Monthly Listeners. His latest single “Suicide” has a little over 100,000 plays there, plus a million views on Youtube and another 80,000 Soundcloud streams,” writes Wissinger. ” But how’s he doing on Pandora? Now you can go to his Next Big Sound profile to find out. At the very top of the profile we can see that Lil Donald’s got 2 million Unique Listeners on Pandora for the last 28 days.”
Opening up Pandora data should help bring the streaming service, which is still the most listened to in the US, more into the industry conversation when measuring an artist’s trajectory.
