Pandora launches AMP artist marketing platform

Pandora today announced the launch of an analytics platform called Pandora AMP that will enable artists to see where their music is being played.

The launch of the AMP platform is a major step forward for Pandora and is likely to generate a lot of good will with artists who have so far been skeptical of the low royalty rates being paid by the company.

Pandora’s Founder Tim Westergren made the announcement in a blog post where he introduces the idea by talking about how with his band he’d travelled over a thousand miles to play just to a handful of people. His goal for Pandora, with over 76 million listeners, 125k artists overall and 11,900 artists who have had their music thumbed up more than 100k times, is to enable artists to discover where their audience is and where their music is being listened to before their get on the road, so they can reach those audiences effectively. Sure, this isn't handing them over the keys to the kingdom but it's enough to point them in the right direction.

The company’s introductory video explains AMP as having three key functions, allowing artists to understand:
- How fans listen.
- Where they listen.
- What they are listening to.

The tagline for the video is “Know your fans. Know where to take your music.”

If the AMP platform works as advertised this could be a major step forward for artists in planning their US tours, but it could also influence labels' release plans and radio strategy going forward. It’s going to be especially interesting to see how the stats coming from AMP will relate to the stats released by Spotify through its partnership with Next Big Sound and how much of an overlap there may be on the results.


(Andrea Leonelli)