BUZZANGLE: LIDESTRI'S BETTER IDEA

Jim Lidestri, the founder/CEO of Border City Media, has a message for the music industry: You need BuzzAngle Music data.

In 2012, Lidestri recognized the need for a more modern and comprehensive presentation of sales and consumption data than what was—and is—available from SoundScan. With an obsession for data and a background in user-interface design, Lidestri built the BuzzAngle prototype and showed it to the major labels.

“Once I saw the interest, I started meeting with sales teams, marketing departments, A&R and radio promo teams,” he says of his initial strategy. In these meetings, Lidestri was schooled in the specific needs of the music industry. “I already knew the basics from looking at the competition,” he says, “but to fully understand how the labels look at sales vs. streams, I actually needed to talk to the customers.”

Since its official launch in July 2015, BuzzAngle has given users daily data and the ability to customize that data by timespan, geography, genre and other criteria. For example, if a manager needs to see the top alternative vinyl sales in Los Angeles, BuzzAngle can generate the report. Similarly, radio promo departments can drill down to see the most-played R&B songs in a given market, along with the corresponding sales and streaming info. The BuzzAngle chart below provides a snapshot of these metrics and their relationships.

“We have tremendous drill-down capability within our filter sets,” Lidestri points out. “There are literally over 10 trillion combinations of reports.”

Currently, BuzzAngle has the U.S., Canada and the Christian markets available on one platform, while showcasing data from the U.K., France, Italy, Spain and Brazil. Lidestri stresses that “We provide the first true global platform for music consumption analysis.”

As for what’s next for BuzzAngle, Lidestri has some expansion in mind. “I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll say expanding the technology for more functionality and then further globalization or international expansion.”