Pandora Now Sharing Listener Data With Artists
The Pandora AMP suite of tools lets the 125,000 artists played on Pandora understand the number of listeners, the number of streams and where those streams originate.
Starting Wednesday, Pandora will provide artists with data and visualization tools to provide insight into their audiences. Called Pandora AMP, the suite of tools is intended to provide artists with the data for such tasks as picking singles, crafting set lists and routing tours.
“With AMP, we hope to make the day in and day out easier for artists by eliminating the guesswork,” wrote founder Tim Westergren in a blog post announcing AMP. The platform lets the 125,000 artists played on Pandora understand the number of listeners, the number of streams and where those streams originate. It also reveals how many unique fans have created a station based on a particular artist, and how many listeners have given an artist “thumb up” feedback. An interactive heat map breaks down the audience by region within the United States. Artists can sign up for the service at amp.pandora.com.
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The value of AMP comes from Pandora’s unparalleled scale. Since inception 9 years ago, the leading Internet radio service has streamed over 50 billion hours of music and listeners have given feedback — using the “thumb up” or “thumb down” buttons — over 45 billion times. Of the over 125,000 artists in the Pandora platform, 11,900 have over 100,000 unique listeners that have given their music a “thumb up” feedback.
AMP also helps Pandora show its value to artists. As Billboard reported in May of 2013, Pandora’s work on an artist dashboard — an early prototype of AMP — dovetailed with calls from the artist and music business communities for higher royalties. Pandora has long emphasized its value in artist development. Now it has a data tool to help drive that point home.
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The release of AMP coincides with the start of a fight over the future of Internet radio royalties. Earlier this month, companies filed initial comments in statutory royalty rate proceedings with the Copyright Royalty Board that will set rates for statutory Internet radio services like Pandora from 2016 to 2020. In effect, Internet radio services will spend the next year or so arguing for rates lower than those proposed by the recording industry.
Regardless of any political implications, AMP stands to be a helpful tool for artists. Ben Singer, manager of singer-songwriter Andy Grammer calls AMP “a total game changer” that affects the majority of Grammer’s fans. “To have access to these analytics will only help us better serve his fans as the music industry continues to evolve,” he says in a statement.
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