Who's Who in Music Tech
Supported by Microsoft
Join 2112 and RockPaperScissors for a comprehensive event including talks from investors, industry leaders, and a wide variety of startups and developers within the music tech community.
Keynote Presentation: Reverse Engineering the Billboard Charts – The Story of Next Big Sound Bringing Data to the Music Industry
Alex White was the CEO of Next Big Sound from its founding in Chicago in 2008 through exit to Pandora (NYSE: P) in 2015. Alex White co-founded Next Big Sound with David Hoffman and Samir Rayani while in Troy Henikoff’s Entrepreneurship class at Northwestern University. The team spent a year and half in Chicago before moving to Boulder, CO for the Techstars Program and ultimately NYC in 2012. Come see the product, hear the story of NBS tracking the online music activity of every band in the world, and an update on what the team is working on now at Pandora.
As the Head of Next Big Sound at Pandora, Alex White oversees a NYC-based team of two dozen data engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists focused on prediction research and cross-platform performance measurement. The team’s mission to make all the data that’s available about every artist in the world useful to music makers and Pandora’s brand clients.
White co-founded Next Big Sound with David Hoffman and Samir Rayani in 2008, while in his last semester at Northwestern University. Next Big Sound raised $7.4 million dollars across two venture financing rounds (2009 and 2012) from Foundry Group, IA Ventures, SoftTech VC and other notable angel investors. On July 1, 2015 Pandora Media (NYSE: P) acquired Next Big Sound, Inc.
White and his co-founders have been featured in Fast Company (#1 most innovative company in the music industry, 2015), Forbes (30 under 30) in the music category three times, Billboard (10 best music companies), Bloomberg BusinessWeek (25 under 25), Entrepreneur Magazine’s 30 under 30 list and in the New York Times, CNN, Fox Business, Washington Post, TechCrunch and many other publications. White sits on the NY Board of Little Kids Rock and enjoys playing soccer, reading, skiing, and traveling for work and pleasure. He lives in New York City.
Pitches:
Seth Hillinger: Founder, AudioDrops
John Willamson: Co-Founder, SongFinch
