Soundcharts is an analytics tool for music artists and labels

French startup Soundcharts is building a sort of App Annie for music artists. This service gives you a ton of data about what’s playing on the radio around the world, what’s popular in Spotify playlists and more. The company just raised $3.1 million (€2.65M) from Alven Capital, as well as Kima Ventures and Global Founders Capital.

Many big music labels already work with companies to get insights about radio airplay. They pay a ton of money to Nielsen to access this data for instance.

Soundcharts wants to level the playing field and add more data. Many people don’t tune into the radio to find new music. They subscribe to popular playlists on Spotify, they follow artists on Facebook and more. If you want to stay ahead of the game, airtime is not enough, at least not anymore.

“We want to be the Bloomberg Finance of music,” founder and CEO David Weiszfeld told me. “Or like what App Annie is doing for apps.”

Soundcharts has servers around the world listening to hundreds of radios at the same time. These servers are using music recognition technology like Shazam to turn an audio signal into structured data.

This way, you can browse by country, by station, by artist or by song and see who is playing what. You can compare your artists with your competitors, you can find out what’s popular and more. It’s also a good tool for festival programmers.

Soundcharts is also using Spotify’s API to index all public playlists and track changes. This way, when a Chvrches song is added to an official Spotify playlist, you can see it in Soundcharts. And if you’re looking for common trends, the service also tracks playlist growth. You’ll be the first to know if dubstep is making a comeback.

Finally, Soundcharts tracks Facebook likes, gives you a breakdown by country and tells you about growth. There are many social media analytics services out there, but it’s a nice way to make Soundcharts a one stop shop. Everybody can access all data, so it’s not limited to your own artists.

So far, 250 companies have signed up, including employees working for Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music, as well as independent labels, publishers and management companies. Those companies pay a recurring subscription to access Soundcharts.

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