The Truth About Pandora and New Music Discovery
February 22, 2010 at 8:00 am Jennifer Lane 3 comments
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…
Entry filed under: Digital Music, Internet radio, streaming. Tags: barefoot truth, bob dylan, bridge ratings, dave matthews, Internet radio, jack johnson, mi2n, music discovery, mystic connecticut, pandora, sonicbids, streaming, usa today.
1. Doug | February 23, 2010 at 9:44 am
Have they been able to monetize all of those spins in some way that would be the equivalent of what the Dave Matthews Band does?
2. Pocket-Radio | February 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Digital revenues from HD Radio, including HD2 and HD3 stations.
Right! Let’s start with the basics ok. First listeners must adopt HD radios, then programming must improve and finally ratings would help. Next to nothing still counts when you’re fudging numbers,
right?
3. Paul Kamp | February 26, 2010 at 9:14 am
To me the most interesting thing about this is that it runs counter to the argument of the RIAA and SoundExchange that there is no promotional value in internet radio.
I would suggest that Pandora use this information to negotiate better rates. Better yet, this is information that should be used in the upcoming CRB rate setting process.