Next Big Sound

Next Big Sound

Company type	Private
Industry	Digital music analytics
Founded	2008
Founder	Samir Rayani, Alex White, Jason Sosnovsky, David Hoffman
Fate	Acquired by Pandora in 2015; ceased operations in 2021
Headquarters	New York City , United States
Area served	Global
Key people	Alex White (CEO), Samir Rayani (CTO), David Hoffman (CPO)
Products	Music analytics tools, Next Big Book
Parent	Pandora (from 2015)

Next Big Sound (NBS) was a privately held firm headquartered in New York, specializing in digital music analytics. The company monitored artist popularity by aggregating data from social media platforms, streaming outlets, and radio airplay. In May 2015, Pandora completed the acquisition of Next Big Sound.

Business model

Next Big Sound offered tools for tracking artist and band mentions across various platforms such as Last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, iLike, and Twitter. It provided visualizations and trend analyses of these data points over time, enabling comparisons with peer musicians. Since its inception in June 2009, NBS had compiled analytics on more than 486,000 musical acts.

History

The origins of Next Big Sound trace back to a project developed by Northwestern University students Samir Rayani (CTO), Alex White (CEO), Jason Sosnovsky (former), and David Hoffman (CPO). After presenting to venture capitalists, they obtained $25,000 in initial seed capital. During the summer of 2009, NBS participated in the TechStars accelerator program located in Boulder, Colorado. On June 1, 2012, the company moved its main office to New York City.

In 2010, Billboard Magazine recognized Next Big Sound as one of the leading ten startups in the music sector, while CEO Alex White earned a spot on Billboard's 30 Under 30 list highlighting promising executives.

On May 25, 2014, NBS expanded its analytics services to the publishing industry through a collaboration with Macmillan Publishers by launching Next Big Book. The company secured $7.5 million in funding from investors including Foundry Group and IA Ventures. Subsequently, on May 19, 2015, Pandora acquired Next Big Sound.

Next Big Sound announced on October 1, 2021, that it would cease operations effective November 1. Its personnel were integrated into Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform (AMP), which continues delivering data-driven insights to clients such as Billboard.