PANDORA'S FEELING AMPED

Pandora is making moves to be more artist- and industry-directed, and rolling out services to help drive the careers of both established and breaking artists.

The streaming radio giant today rolled out their Artist Marketing Platform, AMP, a free online dashboard that gives artist and managers an at-a-glance overview of listener activity.

A dash of the dashboard.

The tool tracks total spins, thumbs up, unique fan-created stations, geographic and demographic breakdowns and an "interactive heat map" highlighting audience size by region. It’s powered by The Music Genome Project and marks the most expansive application yet of Pandora's enormous data trove—culled from its 76 million users and 50 billion-plus hours of listening (1.61b in June 2014 alone); the sign-up page is here.

Founder Tim Westergren, himself a former touring musician, says the service is designed "to harness the power of our scale and data to make artists' lives easier."

Managers are geeked. Atom Factory founder/CEO Troy Carter, for example, says AMP "will be hugely beneficial," adding, "It is exciting to think about not only what I will learn about my artists, but how I will be able to use this information in the future. I love that Pandora has chosen to openly share this data with artists."

Another example of Pandora’s efforts to aid in exposing new music? ThumbMoments, which allows users access to a surprise one-on-one concert when they give an artist a thumbs-up on the platform. Fans have thus far enjoyed unexpected performances by Lindsey Stirling and BUSH, among others.

BUSH surprises Pandora users with a one-on-one concert.

Furthering its emphasis on enriching its relationship with the biz, Pandora last week upped Tommy Page to VP Industry Relations. Page will be building and expanding the company's industry relations team as part of SVP Music Industry Lars Murray's new Music Industry Group .

Speaking of Tommy, we’re really enjoying our “I’ll Be Your Everything” Pandora station. Thumbs up indeed.