Have you ever wondered how an artist’s content has been performing on Pandora but couldn’t find the data you were looking for? Up until recently, Pandora data was only visible to an artist and their manager and label. In an industry where stream counts are an important measure of an artist’s success, the inaccessibility of this data publicly has meant that Pandora’s important role in many artists’ career trajectories has gone unnoticed.
We’re excited to announce that today marks the final wave of Pandora data being publicly unveiled in Next Big Sound. Now, the 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 available to all Next Big Sound users in their email notifications and Weekly Report emails for artists that they follow.
Let’s look at an example of how the availability of Pandora data can change the game for an emerging artist, or for anyone who wants to work with one. Take Atlanta rapper Lil Donald, who’s been around since 2014, but is quietly having a breakout year. If you’ve been following our Predictions Chart, you’ve known about him since he debuted there back in April. And maybe you saw him graduate from Predictions to Trendsetters chart in August.
From there, 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. 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.
A great way to put the high-level Unique Listener and Stream counts into context is to scroll down to Weekly Performance section. We know Lil Donald is on the Trendsetters chart, so it’s no surprise to see he’s on fire this week, massively outperforming the expected number of Thumbs Up per Radio Spin.
So which songs are driving all this success, anyway? We can learn about how the streams break down by scrolling further down to the Releases section.
A quick look shows us that Lil Donald’s streams are entirely driven by his new singles. “Do Better”, released in July, has a whopping 11 million streams, enough to debut on Top Spins September 7. Many of those are Radio Spins, so we can click the metric dropdown and choose Pandora Interactive Plays to hone in on that metric specifically. The numbers are still impressive: “Suicide” has 50,000 total Interactive Plays.
What if all those Radio Spins are just passive listening? A great Pandora metric we can use to see how closely an audience is engaged with what they’re hearing is Station Adds — fans who add an Artist’s station are setting up a whole listening experience modeled around that artist’s sound. In the Reach section, we find that Lil Donald’s had about 3,000 people add his Artist Station or one of his Track Stations this week. And last week too. Overall, he’s got over 60,000 Station Owners — and his growth rate is in the 99th percentile.
Curious how you might be able to stay in the loop with how Lil Donald or other emerging artists are doing? By clicking the Follow button in the top left corner of an artist profile, you can get updates on that artist’s performance on Pandora in our Weekly Report. You’ll even receive Notifications when we identify notable spikes for that artist on Pandora and the other social sources connected.
Now that Pandora data is available to anyone with a Next Big Sound account (for those of you not already signed up, it’s free!), we think there are going to be a lot more cases like Lil Donald on the industry’s radar. So start digging around Next Big Sound to see who’s blowing up on Pandora. We’re excited to see what you find!
Next Big Sound Brings Pandora Data to Light was originally published in Next Big Sound on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
