Next Big Sound predicts big year for NZ and Aus acts in mid-year report
New Zealand band The Black Seeds, Brisbane exports Sheppard and Melbourne artist Vance Joy are generating high levels of online activity in the US.
New York-based online analytics firm Next Big Sound, which was acquired by Pandora Radio in May, has released its a mid-year report on the online industry; Data to Date: The Rapid Rise of Social and Streaming.
In the report, Next Big Sound listed the tracks on YouTube that are most resonating with music fans in the US.
The Black Seeds’ single Coming Back Home, taken from the Wellington seven-piece’s debut LP, is ranked #9 in the list of the most promising acts on YouTube. The official clip has amassed over 10,700 views.
Based on data collated in January this year, Next Big Sound also listed Vance Joy’s breakout single Riptide as the #3 most established track on YouTube (it now has over 81m views), behind US artists Sam Hunt and Walk The Moon. Vance Joy, aka James Keogh is currently on tour with Taylor Swift as part of her 1989 world tour.
Adelaide export Sia is listedas #10 most 'Epic' artist (artists which have released multi-Platinum singles)due to the traction from the clipfor global #1 Chandelier.To date, the video has amassed over 848 million streams on YouTube.
In the first six months of the year Next Big Sound tracked over 1 trillion online plays from streams across YouTube, Vevo, Vimeo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud and Pandora.
SoundCloud, which is till undergoing discussions with labels for the launch of a subscription service, tracked almost 5 billion plays on the service in May. The figure is 2x that of the same month a year before, and 5x that of the year prior.
Drake topped the firm’s list of artists with the most plays on SoundCloud in the first half of 2015, followed by Major Lazer and G-Eazy. Drake’s latest release If You're Reading This It's Too Latebecame the first album released in 2015 to sell a million copies in the US. Announced this week, the album has sold 1.007 million copies.
Drake was also the #1 most-streamed artist on Rdio and the artistwith the most Stations added on Pandora in the first half of 2015, with over 1.4 billion plays.
Taylor Swift attracted the most Facebook and Instagram followers in the first six month of 2015, as well the most views on Vevo. Of course, the pop artist is absent from Next Big Sound’s top artist chart for Spotify (Swift removed her catalogue from the service last November) but she’s also absent from Spotify’s competitor Rdio. This isn’t to say she’s not popular on audio streaming services; she’s #2 on Pandora’s most popular artist list.
Interestingly, latin artists are more engaged on Facebook than any other service considered by Next Big Sound in the report. In the past six months, latin music artists made up 5% of all activity for artists. Boston-based reggaeton MC Nicky Jam tops the list of artists with the most Facebook likes. Of the 10 artists that attracted the highest number of page likes in the first half of the year, five fall within the latin genre.
