Searching Social Networks For Indie Artists

It’s obvious enough why Shazam, 300, and now Gracenote are all moving into mining social data to predict the next big artist, before they’re the next big thing, but what’s not obvious is why the next big thing matters that much.

Right now, the entire music industry makes less money in a year than Apple makes in a few weeks. So, it can’t solely be about the money. People are still listening to music and streaming it in large volumes, but consumers aren’t paying for it in any meaningful numbers, and adding or exposing more “hit bands” won’t change that.

300 will be using data direct from Twitter unavailable to anyone else for a year, Shazam will of course be using data generated by its users tagging songs, and Gracenote will using Next Big Sound and Musicmetric for its data source.

Rich Riley, CEO of Shazam, says “We are combining industry expertise with a very unique data signal of what artists are actually resonating with consumers. This data hasn’t been used before and we are excited to see what artists can be discovered and to participate in the economics as we discover and develop new artists.”

From the murmurs and off the record comments I’m hearing, the most reasonable answer to why companies are interested in mining user data is as straight forward as it seems. Everyone is trying to ‘moneyball’ their industry, except in the case of the music industry, there’s very little money in that ball. All of this is just a first step.

“We think this will be one of many signals and attributes that they evaluate when considering whether an artist should be signed,” says Riley. “Like any signal it will be continuously tuned. This is applying big data to the A&R function which will be used in combination with all of their other methods, not replacing them.”

Twitter and Google searches have both been used to predict disease outbreak, as well as other trends before they hit mainstream awareness. It’s only natural the same data would be picked apart looking for which artists are being talked about early in their careers and how the ground swell for their success starts.

The timing of all these deals and announcements remains the biggest question mark. Why is everyone jumping into this space right now?