Next Big Sound Introduces: Pandora Playlists & Discovery

A deeper dive into how artists are getting discovered on Pandora.

Pandora is a service widely recognized for its ability to promote the discovery of new artists. Combining the power of Pandora’s Genome with the genre expertise of our curation team, artists are constantly being recommended to audiences most likely to engage with their music.

While we recently introduced two new metrics to better share the scale of artists on Pandora with Monthly Unique Listeners and Streams, today we are very excited to share more context around how and where artists are getting discovered on the platform.

Introducing: Pandora Playlists & Discovery

The new Pandora Playlists & Discovery section on Next Big Sound Artist Profiles displays the top radio stations, playlists and on-demand sources where artists are getting discovered on Pandora.

Let’s look at the example of Paty Cantú. She recently saw a significant spike of streams and unique listeners on Pandora, more than doubling her audience compared to the previous 28 days. Where are all of these new listeners coming from? Let’s dive into it.

A high-level breakdown of streams on Pandora

An artist’s streams on Pandora can be attributed to a variety of different sources, all of which can be categorized into the following distinct buckets:

1. Streams an artist is getting for their music on their own artist station
2. Streams an artist is getting for their music on other stations (i.e. other artist stations or genre stations)
3. Streams an artist is getting from on-demand sources (i.e. on-demand album plays, track plays, playlists)

You’ll notice that a majority of artists are seeing more streams from other stations than from their own, showcasing the broad impact Pandora has had on these artist’s careers by playing their music on a variety of stations and introducing their music to new listeners.

For this case, 67% of Paty Cantú’s streams (98,000) are coming from Pandora playing her music on other artists and genre stations. 17% are coming from her own station, and 16% from Pandora on-demand.

Top Pandora Discovery sources at the artist level

Now that we have a sense of where plays are coming from, let’s dive into the data. The next section displays the top 5 sources of play on Pandora for an artist’s entire catalog. While the first tab focuses on the overall top sources, we also allow you to look more deeply into top radio sources or on-demand sources by toggling through the tabs.

While Paty Cantú’s biggest source of plays is her own artist radio, she has been getting a significant amount of spins from Maluma radio in the past 28 days, a station created by 3.9 million Pandora users, where she received 18,500 spins. She has also seen plays coming from two genre stations: Pop Latino and Las Diosas Del Pop Latino, in addition to Pandora’s Pop Latino de Hoy playlist.

To get more information about any of these sources, it’s as easy as clicking the link to get to the right page on Pandora.

More from your most popular tracks

This data is also available at the track level, for the 5 most played tracks in the past 28 days, and including any track currently featured on AMP

Featured Tracks accelerates discovery and feedback from listeners for your new priority tracks and expedites the tracks’ path to their natural peak rotation on Pandora. The ability to feature a track is free and available for every artist on Pandora.

Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie the data

This feature is available starting today for all Pandora AMP-Authenticated artists and labels on Next Big Sound.

Originally sourced from Next Big Sound.