Archive for February 22, 2010
The Truth About Pandora and New Music Discovery
According to some recent research by Bridge Ratings, listeners expect Internet radio stations to be more adventurous and provide them with more opportunities to discover new music. Independent band Barefoot Truth would attest to that. The band has been around loosely since 2003, but recently submitted a cd to Pandora. That’s when it started to get exciting.
According to a recent article in USA Today, the band’s songs started showing up on stations created for fans of Bob Dylan, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews. “All of a sudden, people we had never met before were buying our music online and asking us to play in their cities,” band guitarist Jay Driscoll says. “Then we started seeing strangers singing the words to the songs at our shows.”
Now their songs have seen over 4.5 million spins on Pandora - according to Sonicbids, an online booking platform for indie bands. That’s a lot – according to music trade publication mi2n, “the 4.5 million figure is notable for a band at this level (by comparison, ‘Where Are You Going’ by Dave Matthews Band has notched 10 million spins,) and Barefoot Truth happily credits ‘The Pandora Effect’ for its crucial role in generating their growing army of listeners.”
Not bad for a band from Mystic, Connecticut (also world headquarters to Audio4cast). It’s a great story about the way Internet radio can open up opportunities for bands to get heard and listeners to hear new bands. It doesn’t hurt that BFT’s music is infectious and Pandora’s audience is growing exponentially. May they thrive…
