We’re back with a special music-related analytics episode! Following Next Big Sound’s acquisition by Pandora, Julien Benatar moved from engineering into product management and is now responsible for the company’s analytics applications in the Creator Tools division. He and his team of engineers, data scientists and designers provide insights on how artists are performing on Pandora and how they can effectively grow their audience. This was a particularly fun interview for me since I have music playing on Pandora and occasionally use Next Big Sound’s analytics myself. Julien and I discussed:

How Julien’s team accounts for designing for a huge range of customers (artists) that have wildly different popularity, song plays, and followers

How the service generates benchmark values in order to make analytics more useful to artists

How email notifications can be useful or counter-productive in analytics servicesHow Julien thinks about the Data Pyramid when building out their platform

Having a “North Star” and driving analytics toward customer action

The types of predictive analytics Next Big Sound is doing

Resources and Links:

Julien Benatar on Twitter

Next Big Sound website

Next Big Sound blog

The Data Pyramid model

Quotes from Julien Benatar

"I really hope we get to a point where people don’t need to be data analysts to look at data."

"People don’t just want to look at numbers anymore, they want to be able to use numbers to make decisions."

"One of our goals was to basically check every artist in the world and give them access to these tools and by checking millions of artists, it allows us to do some very good and very specific benchmarks"

“The way it works is you can thumb up or thumb down songs. If you thumb up a song, you’re giving us a signal that this is something that you like and something you want to listen to more. That’s data that we give back to artists.”

“I think the great thing today is that, compared to when Next Big Sound started in 2009, we don’t need to make a point for people to care about data. Everyone cares about data today.”

Episode Transcript

Brian: I’m really excited today for this episode. We have Julien Benatar on the show and he’s from a company that I’m sure a lot of people here know. You probably have had headphones on at your desk, at home, or wherever you are listening to Pandora for music. Julien , correct me if I’m wrong, you were the product manager for artist tools and insights at Next Big Sound, which is a type of data product that provides information on music listening stats to, I assume, artists’ labels as well to help them understand where their fans are and social media engagement.

I love this topic. I’m also a musician, I have a profile on Next Big Sound and I feel music’s a fun way to talk about analytics and design as well because everybody can relate to the content and the domain. Welcome to the show. Did I get all that correct?

Julien: Yeah, it was perfect.

Brian: Cool. Tell us a little about your background. You’re from France originally?

Julien: Yes, exactly. I grew up next to Paris, in Versailles more specifically, and moved to New York in 2014 to join Next Big Sound.

Brian: Cool, nice. You’ve been there for about four years, s