There are countless tools artists can use to see statistics for their music and learn about their audience, and one of the most effective is www.nextbigsound.com.

“This has been a great tool for me,” said WordPlay T. Jay. “It lets me se what my audience is, adjust my strategies and make sue I’m on tract to grow as an artist and grow as a brand.”

Mostly, nextbigsound.com is used to track Pandora information, but other sites, such as Facebook, can be rolled in, too.

To use nextbigsound.com, an artist must have an account at amp.pandora.com. Once connected, the home page will show the artists’ main photo, total number of streams, engagement information and artist stage. Audience engagement tells where tracks are performing best, and artist stage tells the possibility for growth if staying on the current pace.

The following are other features of nextbigsound.com that may help artists improve their marketing strategies:

• The streams page shows unique listeners and number of streams.

• Playlist and discovery page shows where listeners found tracks, but it in the artist’s channel, another artist’s channel or through specific search. It also shows which other artists’ channels songs tend to play in.

• A heatmap shows where, geographically, tracks are doing the best. This is a useful tool for know ing where to tour and where to target new listeners.

• Audience demographic shows stats on gender, age, etc. of listeners, which can be used to obtain a better balance of listeners.

• The releases page shows the number of streams per track.

• The metrics page shows the number of streams, radio spins, ads, thumbs up, etc. and artist has received. The most important of these is thumbs up, as Pandora will push a track and artist harder when the thumbs up is pressed.

• nextbigsound.com can also communicate with numerous other sites, including Facebook, and gives breakdowns of interactions for each site and allows artists to edit the data sources for each site.

For those interested, nexbigsound.com is a free site that is easy to navigate and could make a difference in how an artists markets, tours or releases new music.