Next Big Sound Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: COMPANY

INITIAL LIGHT BULB As an intern with Universal Motown in 2005, Alex White had big dreams. "I wanted to be the mogul with the corner office," he says. "I realized my friends wanted to do the same thing,"

So White merged the concept behind fantasy sports with the music industry into "a consumer-facing music site where people could play the role of record mogul and sign acts to their fantasy label."

After the company was accepted into the TechStars program in Boulder in 2009, the target market changed from consumers to industry on the first day of the program. White and his co-founders, Samir Rayani and David Hoffman, decided to relocate from Chicago to Colorado during TechStars and launched the Next Big Sound website in August 2009. The company has eight full-time employees.

IN A NUTSHELL Next Big Sound offers intelligence on thousands of musical bands, culling data from all corners of the Web. Beyond tracking activity on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and other popular websites, it also captures mentions in the press and blogosphere. Users can look at the data in numerous ways, from demographic and geographic audience breakdowns to recommendations for boosting online listening activity.

"We sell a centralized dashboard to the music industry so they can keep tabs on everything that's going on," White says. For most of the history of the music industry, album sales have been the key metric, but those times are gone, White says. "There was this massive void," he says. "CD sales weren't reflecting how people were interacting with music online."

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White says labels use the site's metrics to evaluate the return they're getting on their marketing dollars. "If you're spending S500 a week on Facebook ads or Google ads or fliers around town, you want to see what's moving the needle."

Next Big Sound employs a "freemium" model: Users can access limited information for free...