Pandora "AMPs" Audience Analytics to Boost Musician-Listener Engagement

Internet radio service Pandora is offering its listener data to its artists in an attempt to help struggling musicians better target audiences.

Pandora has launched AMP, a free program that shares listener data with its 150,000 musicians, in order to give artists and their managers better insights into audiences.

AMP will include geographic and demographic breakdowns of each artist’s audiences, along with an interactive heat map highlighting locations around the United States where an artist’s music is attracting attention. Other features include access to song-by-song performance information — which includes total track spins and number of thumbs up for each track — and a count of fans who have created a station for the artist.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren, a former touring musician himself, believes AMP will make it easier for artists who receive little mainstream radio attention to market themselves to a wider audience. He hopes sharing data will "usher in a new era of artist marketing, creating efficient tools at scale for tens of thousands of working bands to enter the mainstream."

Most artists have limited resources and no readily available tools for targeting audiences, leaving them to guess where their fans live and which songs they like, according to Westergren, who said in a recent blog post that artists who aren't picked up by broadcast radio are often left with only "flyers and a staple gun" for marketing tools. However, he hopes AMP will change the way that bands tour and market themselves. "Listener data and insights can better inform critical management decisions, like choosing tour stops, building concert set lists, and selecting tour partners. Today, for most working bands, that is done completely blind," he tells ClickZ.

AMP also provides value to listeners, says Westergren, by building stronger connections between fans and artists. "AMP creates the opportunity for listeners to give back to artists by allowing [artists] to self-identify as fans and invite the audience to reach out to them," adding that Pandora is currently "pro-actively gathering feedback from artists to determine what to build next on top of this analytics layer."