Can Big Data Discover The Next Pop Star?

Online music hub ReverbNation is discovering talented artists by mixing big data with human curation.

- John Paul Titlow

As an 11-year-old living in Ogden, Utah, Sammy Brue wasn’t expecting much when he uploaded some demos to ReverbNation, a site that helps unsigned musicians showcase their tunes on customized web pages, build an audience, and submit music to radio stations and record labels. But three years later, Brue’s career is taking off: The singer-songwriter has signed to prominent music-management company Red Light and is being courted by big labels—all directly due to ReverbNation’s new data-driven incubation program, Connect.

When it launched in 2006, the site set out to be a social network and do-it-yourself 

platform for musicians in the same vein as Myspace, helping artists steer their own careers. Now-famous musicians such as Alabama Shakes, Imagine Dragons, and Kacey Musgraves hosted music on the site early in their careers. Though many artists have since gravitated toward newer sites such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud to share their music, ReverbNation remains a big player, hosting pages for around 4 million artists; some 200,000 new songs are uploaded each month. That’s a lot of noise, but it’s also a big asset. Beneath ReverbNation’s interface flows a river of data on up-and-coming artists that, the company came to realize, could be highly valuable—for musicians like Brue, for ReverbNation, and for the beleaguered music business.