Business News Deals Digital

Pandora buys Next Big Sound

By | Published on Wednesday 20 May 2015

Next Big Sound

So now we know for certain: Integrate your digital music platform with a funky new music data service to inform your playlisting activity and/or help rights owners navigate your usage stats, and it’s only a matter of time before said data service gets acquired by a competitor, which then gets access to all the knowledge and intelligence you helped the data crunchers amass. Good times.

Yes, after Spotify bought The Echo Nest and Apple acquired Musicmetric, now Pandora has bought Next Big Sound. And while officially speaking it’s ‘business as usual’ at the music analytics company, you have to think that Next Big Sound client Spotify will respond in much the same way Rdio did when Spotify bought Echo Nest, ie “we’re out of here”. I mean, it’s as if the only way you could ever make money out of a music data start-up is to wait around until one of the big tech firms buys you!

But while this deal may be bad news for Pandora competitors which have made use of Next Big Sound’s popular analytics machine, and while the data firm’s founders should now prepare themselves for the flood of Pandora-hate they will have to swim in from now on, there’s a lot of sense to this acquisition.

Pandora – hated by everyone but the 80 million people who use the service – has been trying to placate a tetchy music community with better data tools, launching its own platform called AMP last year. Next Big Sound will no doubt be used to enhance that service. Plus Pandora will utilise Next Big Sound data to court brands looking to partner with the US streaming platform, and given the vast majority of its users are on freemium, boosting ad sales is a key objective for the digital firm.

Confirming the deal, Pandora boss Brian P McAndrews told reporters that “the combination of Pandora’s listening data and Next Big Sound’s analytical capabilities will create a vital source of data”.



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