BuzzAngle Music brings big-data power to an industry lacking timely, granular, and transparent data. Before BuzzAngle, customers of the industry’s sole reporting service, Nielsen SoundScan, struggled with its limited report capabilities and once-a-week processing. On top of that, there were disparate systems for the U.S., Canada, and rest of world. BuzzAngle changes all that. “BuzzAngle Music has disrupted the market by using new age technologies to store, process and pull out the needed information rapidly,” says Jim Lidestri, CEO of Border City Media, the company behind BuzzAngle Music. “We have a single global platform that allows deep querying and granular breakdowns to provide total transparency of the data, all in a system that’s more affordable. Users end up with the best of both worlds – better and more affordable than what’s prevailed for decades.”
Now publicly available, BuzzAngle Music 2.0 offers daily reporting of physical and digital sales, on-demand streaming, and terrestrial airplay in both the US and Canada, and is beginning trials of streaming data in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and Brazil. (All retailers and service providers of physical sales, digital sales, and on-demand streaming are reporting their data directly to BuzzAngle Music.) “In a very short time, BuzzAngle Music has become a become an indispensable tool for our entire team. The depth of information and the daily data allows us to be far more nimble in identifying and reacting to activity in a market. It’s become vital to have a more complete picture of the marketplace and BuzzAngle Music provides the info we need to do the best job for our artists,” says Matt Harmon, President, Beggars Group US. Customers of BuzzAngle Music include the major U.S. distributors, the RIAA as well as independent labels, artist management firms and publishing companies such as: Beggars Group, Country Music Television, SONGS Music Publishing, Victory Records, Epitaph Records, Eleven Seven Music,, Dualtone Music Group (an Entertainment One company), Hillsong Music Australia, CD Baby, Big Deal Music and Q Prime Management. BuzzAngle Music processes data daily (as opposed to the current Nielsen SoundScan standard of weekly reports). Its platform allows users to run over a trillion unique reports, sliced into markets, customized to their exact genre or subgenre for each consumption type. These reports can be scheduled to run automatically, according to user preferences. These reporting tools may seem like minor, geeky moments. But they are vital in an industry fractured into nearly infinite possibilities and options, when the old roads to listeners and income have faded. Timely, highly searchable data are the only way to uncover what’s working and what might work. A manager can note what potential tour stops are the best by seeing an increase in streams and radio airplay. A brand using music as part of an ad campaign can gauge the impact of the song and see what artists or songs might get the most traction. Speed of processing matters. The advent of a Friday Global Release Day means stakeholders need to know before Monday what’s afoot, and BuzzAngle Music will tell them. “You need to give the labels and artists time to react to what’s happening with a new release,” explains Lidestri. “Daily updates give them a chance to affect results as opposed to just wondering what is happening.” This knowledge powers decisions. BuzzAngle Music integrates global tracking and allows for a customized selection of geographic regions, another feature vital to the new music business, spread over multiple, sometimes far-flung markets. It allows users to search using more than a thousand genres. Instead of separate systems to track each area or to track a mere handful of genres, BuzzAngle Music can compile global data for users into one handy report or chart, specifically for that user’s musical style of interest. “You can really drill down,” notes Lidestri, “and you can do it all in a single interface.” More than 250,000 chart combinations are available publically at www.buzzanglemusic.com/charts/
Border City Media is a New York-based music technology company that has developed a unique set of services that radically change the way businesses analyze entertainment consumption and related trends. BuzzAngle Music is the first in a series of Border City Media services that will also include BuzzAngle Movies and BuzzAngle Books. Border City Media was founded by Jim Lidestri, previously President and Chief Executive Officer of Interliant, Inc. one of the industry’s first application service providers. Twitter: @buzzanglemusic