(UPDATED) Music analytics startup Next Big Sound has closed a $6.5 million Series A financing round led by IA Ventures and Foundry Group. The Boulder, Colorado based company will use the funds to open a New York City office and expand it's team.
This new investment is the first round of financing for Next Big Sound since going through the TechStars program and a subsequent $1 million seed funding round in 2009.
Next Big Sound offers a free basic artist analytics package, as well as, a $79 per month Premier offering that presents real time analytics from across the web alongside, radio play, event data and sales in sophisticated dashboards. The company says that two of the three major music groups as Premier platform clients. Next Big Sound also licenses two charts to Billboard - the Social 50 and the Next Big Sound chart of up and coming artists.
"We are on a mission to transform the music industry through data by making the billions of public and private data points useful," said Alex White, Next Big Sound co-founder and CEO. "If you are a music industry professional not using data to inform your decisions, you are going to be left behind.”
But Next Big Sound does not have the music data space all to itself. Late last month, concert giant Live Nation aquired music data leader Big Champagne and added former Warner Brothers Records SVP of Technology Ethan Kaplan to the team. More major hires and some ambitious plans were peculating as the Big Champagne team moved into Live Nation's offices yesterday.
HELP WANTED: As part of the financing, Next Big Sound announced that it will be opening an office in NYC and is hiring infrastructure engineers, quants/data hackers, sys admins, front-end developers and data visualization experts. (Info @ nextbigsound.com/jobs)
Find more job openings and internships including fresh offerings from Sonos, Machine Shop Marketing and an indie record label on The Hypebot Music Industry Jobs Board.
EMPLOYERS: Post your job opening there and across the Simply Hired network for just $29 per month.
