Pandora’s Next Big Sound Service To Shut Down Nov. 1

Pandora’s music analytics service Next Big Sound will be shutting down on Nov. 1, 2021. The service will be transitioning over to Pandora’s Artist Marketing Platform (AMP).

Next Big Sound was acquired by Pandora in 2015, but has been tracking music data across hundreds of thousands of artists and billions of streams for 12 years.

“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,” the Next Big Sound team shared in a blog post. “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.”

Next Big Sound’s Pandora Charts will be getting a facelift and will have some tweaks fixed, among them Pandora’s Top Thumb Hundred will join the Top Spins and Trendsetters charts as regular emails and Pandora Playlists. The company will also continue to contribute Pandora streaming data to its partners at Billboard, MRC Data, ChartMetric, and more.

Pandora’s Programming Notification Emails will be transitioning over to AMP with Next Big Sound. However, the company’s social data will not come with them.

“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,” the team explained. “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 many alternatives available for social media tracking that provide more context across more sources, such as Chartmetric.com and others.

“We’re really excited to move forward with a more focused, consistent experience for all of our users,” the team adds. “Thanks for joining us for more than a decade of watching the music industry evolve and grow. We’ll see you over in AMP!”