Stung by accusations that it doesn’t pay enough royalties to artists, Pandora Media has been quietly working on a tool that would demonstrate the company’s value by giving artists more information on how their songs perform on its Internet radio service.
The tool is essentially a dashboard that tells artists such things as the spin counts of each of their songs, how many thumbs up (or down) their songs have received and their audience reach by age, gender and geography, among other things. Pandora has been circulating the prototype to various independent artists in recent weeks, soliciting feedback as a possible prelude to releasing a self-serve product for all artists looking to check on their performance on Pandora.
The effort dovetails with a growing chorus of musicians who have lobbied music services for access to more data that could help artists better promote their careers. Partly as a response to this movement for “data transparency,” Spotify last week began publicly displaying total play counts for individual songs.
Read the full story: Billboard