Next Big Sound Blog Saying Goodbye to Next Big Sound

It’s been a wild ride. After 12 years of tracking music data across hundreds of thousands of artists and hundreds of billions of streams, it’s time to say goodbye. Next Big Sound will be shutting down on November 1, 2021.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. Pandora’s AMP tools have been the primary focus of our development and growth for two years already, and we’re really excited about the opportunities we can create for artists and creators across the industry on the AMP platform.Our team has been hard at work to make sure it is as seamless as possible for all of our users and partners. You can already see full track-level reporting for your whole catalog in AMP, along with more context about where your music is playing than we were ever able to bring to Next Big Sound. Still, a few of our features will be changing in the move over to AMP, so here are some details about what to expect.Next Big Sound’s Pandora Charts are getting a facelift and some tweaks. We’ve added a new chart in the last year, so now Pandora’s Top Thumb Hundred will join our Top Spins and Trendsetters charts as regular emails and Pandora Playlists. The Playlists and stations will be curated every week as always, and our chart emails will resume as soon as we finish development on our new email system in a few months. We will also continue to contribute Pandora streaming data to our partners at Billboard, MRC Data, ChartMetric, and more.Pandora’s Programming Notification Emails will also be transitioning over to AMP with us as well. We’ve given the emails a new look and feel and are beginning an open beta period shortly. Make sure you get set up on AMP for any artists you’re working with so you don’t lose any valuable context on where your music is being programmed on Pandora.Finally, after a lot of deliberation, we have decided that Next Big Sound social data is not going to be moving over to AMP with us. 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. This means that it’s also time to say goodbye to the Pandora Predictions chart. Our Next Big Sound Predictions were always intended to be a look across streaming and social media to identify artists on the rise, so with these social data sources going away we’re going to retire the Predictions chart as well.There are already excellent alternatives available for social media tracking that provide more context across more sources than we have been able to sustain. Check out Chartmetric.com (where you’ll also see your Pandora data for valuable context) and others if you need to keep tracking your social media data.We’re really excited to move forward with a more focused, consistent experience for all of our users. Thanks for joining us for more than a decade of watching the music industry evolve and grow. We’ll see you over in AMP!Cheers,The Next Big Sound TeamSaying Goodbye to Next Big Sound was originally published in Next Big Sound on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.