Band Metrics tracks, analyzes, and scores the overall popularity of a musician, band or song by aggregating and interpreting all relevant online content. The Company achieves this through its patent-pending Popularity Profiling System (“PPS”). This system aggregates comprehensive information about bands and musicians from across the Internet, examining both quantitative and qualitative data and then returning the results in an easy-to-use analytical dashboard.
Presently, there exists no systematic way to interpret all the data available online to determine the true popularity of a musician or band. Traditional measurement tactics are not able to sufficiently track social networks, digital media plays, and peer-to-peer network plays.
Band Metrics is one of the first companies able to search and aggregate data across different websites, thus incorporating not just quantitative data (i.e. number of downloads), but also qualitative data from the scores of social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Last.FM, iLike) where bands and musicians have garnered massive listener followings.
The company has some tangential competition, such as BigChampagne, looking at P2P data, The Echo Nest, providing digital music analysis tools, and nearby Athens based Rank ‘Em, which is measuring song popularity based on fan opinion, but Band Metrics seems to have a first-mover advantage as a comprehensive business analytical tool for the industry.
The revenue model is subscriptions from artists and music industry businesses and professionals.
The Popularity Profiling System has two elements: 1) the Intelligent Agent Framework (IAF) and 2) the Popularity Profile Engine. The Intelligent Agent Framework is responsible for gathering structured (quantitative) and unstructured data (qualitative) from across the web including such things as song plays, song downloads, song sales, comments, reviews and ratings from within the blogosphere. The Popularity Profile Engine then calculates the data collected from the IAF (both the qualitative and quantitative), delivering a band’s overall sentiment index relative to its genre and/or the entire indie music industry.
The music industry is increasingly shifting towards becoming a digital medium as traditional business models are replaced with online counterparts. Currently, digital music sales account for 18% of total U.S. music sales. This figure is expected to grow to 41% by the year 2013 (Forrester Research). Artists are increasingly relying on the Internet as a vehicle for the discovery and distribution of their music.
However, the cycle of popularity for an artist changes dramatically over time and is constantly in flux. Presently there is no effective system for record labels, music supervisors or bands themselves to measure and analyze their popularity within the industry or within different geographies. Band Metrics solves that problem and helps the industry identify and capitalize on new and upward trending bands and songs.
Band Metrics is lead (with great passion, I might add) by Duncan Freeman, Founder and President. He is a former member and manager of two independent bands and has fifteen years of experience in the technology industry in a breadth of roles. He has had two other start-up ventures and was a General Manager for Mindspring (now EarthLink). He writes a leading music technology blog IndieMusicTech.
