Next Big Sound releases 2014 State Of The Industry report

[Kurt]

For those not familiar with it, Next Big Sound is a great music/tech startup based in NYC for whom I wish I could work that provides social media analytics for musicians (and now, book authors with a new spinoff called Next Big Book); their data also fuels several of Billboard's charts, including the Social 50. They recently released their year-in-review report for 2014 on the music industry, including info on the roles of social media networks, branding deals, etc.

Read the full report here: www.nextbigsound.com/industryreport/2014

Some items of note:
- total plays: 434 billion
- total fans: 17 billion
- people are listening to more music via SoundCloud, but not following artists as much as in the past
- in social music, Instagram is growing faster than Twitter
- 1/4 of music follows on Twitter were for indie-rock musicians
- pop/rock takes up 24% of distribution on social platforms; pure pop is another 8%
- 57% of the music industry's branding partnerships with Fortune 100 companies were with Universal Music Group and its affiliated labels (that's # of deals, not a representation of their size/$)
- their data-backed predictions of artists on the rise: Smallpools, James Bay, and Sheppard

[Libra]

Hmmmmmmm. I find myself having mixed feelings over this report. A lot of it strikes me as being different findings that, all in all, really don't seem all that surprising. On the other hand, reading through it did have me reflecting on my own musical consumption habits as of late, so at the same time there is also a sense of a report like this being that thing that makes you stop and take a look at the whole picture.


The point of Instagram growing and Twitter plateauing - should we really be surprised? This seems more reflective of natural life cycles than anything else - Instagram is newer, so the only way it wouldn't be growing faster would be if it wasn't really that successful in general, in which case we wouldn't even be talking about them. And when the next big social media platform comes along, it'll be 'oh, that one's growing faster than the older ones', and so forth. The addictive, seductive nature of printing the headlines promoting the new is also, no doubt, responsible for many of the ones also predicting the demise of platforms like Facebook.

What's the typical trajectory of artists with SoundCloud? Have artists been typically using SoundCloud accounts for regular exposure to their music, or are we finding them using it less and less as they become more and more successful?

Somewhat conversely, with YouTube and services like Spotify, we can find both the more successful and the less successful (or just starting out) on there - it's just harder/less likely to find those whose profiles are lower.

Pop/Rock ruling the digital airwaves - to what extent is this reflective of Pop's own wild success in the past few years?, I have to wonder. That is to say...would it not go hand-in-hand, that the current top genre in music overall would also be the top digital genre? The only ways I would think that this wouldn't be the case, is if either one other genre had a monstrous digital presence compared to the other (which the findings show to not be), or if the current overall top genre was on the verge of major decline (which also doesn't seem likely at this time).


(I do kind of have to chuckle at SoundCloud having an EDM-heavy rep though. Since November, my first exposure to several of my current favorites has been through SoundCloud - to name a few: "Little Toy Guns", "The Rhythm", "Follow", "Karaoke", "I'm Ready". Nice cross-section represented there, no? ;))

In the brands section of the report, I was disappointed that they didn't include a brand value graph to go alongside the number of brand deals one. That feels like a missing piece of the puzzle there.