It’s part business plan, part music analysis, part music streaming, and it was created by four Northwestern University students as a senior project in an entrepreneurship class.Alex White, the CEO of nextbigsound.com (NBS) and an ‘08 graduate of Northwestern, created the online music analyst site with fellow classmates David Hoffman ‘09, Samir Rayani ‘09 and Jason Sosnovsky ‘09 (who has since left the group).

White came up with this idea after interning at Motown Records. The site, in fact, started out with a completely different feel compared to the analytical site it has morphed into today. The website began as a place where “anyone [could] play the role of a record mogul and sign ‘bands’ to their own fantasy label,” says White. “We would track the order in which you signed those bands and you would get points based on the number of people who signed the bands…so we could see where people were finding new talent before anyone else.” In practice, visitors to the website would be able to listen to as many tracks of indie artists as they wanted and would then be able to sign up to 10 bands to their “label.”

For White and the rest of his classmates, what started off as a music gaming site of sorts transformed into a full-time career when they took the website to the next level last June.

“[Now] we do online music analytics and insight,” says White. “We track the growth and popularity of bands across sites where they already exist. We sell insights around that to band managers and other industry professionals.”

According to White, the change was necessary. “Being a streaming music site was insanely hard,” says White. NBS had to compete with hundreds of other sites, like MySpace and Pandora, which also tried to break into the craze.

“We wanted to solve a problem that was very real, that would be valuable to the industry and [that would] generate revenue, so we could keep doing this and run the business in the future,” says White. The idea of tracking bands’ airplay on the web originated from an interest in how bands become famous. Currently, the site is thriving. NBS is tracking close to half a million artists across six major web properties. They even captured their first trajectory of a band that went from 1,000 plays a day on MySpace to number one on iTunes. Furthermore, since starting to record data from the music industry in June, NBS has watched about five bands go from unheard of to instant superstars. Perhaps the best example of the summer, according to White, was British singer/songwriter and rapper Jay Sean, whose hit, “Down,” skyrocketed from 100 plays to his peak of over half a million plays per day.

For White and his fellow business partners, NBS is more than just a site for music. “We want to help change the industry by bringing and displaying data in a way that’s easy to understand and that make it easy to make decisions,” says White.

grace WEITZ
Alexandra Hollander contributed to this story.