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Business News Digital
SoundCloud no longer providing data to Next Big Sound
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 20 August 2015
No real surprise here, but it’s been confirmed that SoundCloud has stopped sharing its stats with music data firm Next Big Sound.
That’s not surprising because Next Big Sound was acquired by Pandora back in May, and we’ve seen this before: buzzy music-data-crunching agency gets bought by one or another digital service provider, insists it’s business as usual, but the other digital service providers that previously gave it access to backroom stats start to bail.
After Next Big Sound announced on Twitter that SoundCloud is no longer providing it with stats, a spokesman for the latter told Music Ally: “Since SoundCloud’s beginning we’ve focused on building an ecosystem where creativity thrives. That creativity includes developers who have built innovative services using SoundCloud’s API. With the recent acquisition of Next Big Sound by Pandora, we have decided, as a normal course of business, that the time has come for Next Big Sound to discontinue using SoundCloud’s API”.
With the big two music data start-ups – Musicmetric and Next Big Sound – now owned by major players in digital music, Apple and Pandora respectively, plus, of course, Spotify bought that other interesting data-based music firm Echo Nest, there is arguably a gap in the market for a new neutral music data business.
Though would that new firm have to make some commitment to clients and data providers on both the music and digital sides that it won’t ultimately sell out to one big digital player – or a major music company for that matter – giving competitors ownership of music and business intelligence said clients and providers helped gather?
But then again, if you’re setting up a music data start-up, is there a long-term business model that doesn’t involve being bought up and becoming the in-house insights team at a music or digital company with other revenue streams?
