Penske Media Makes Strategic Investment in BuzzAngle Music
By Variety Staff
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Penske Media Corporation (PMC) is making a strategic investment in BuzzAngle Music, the company announced today. Founded in 2013, and launched in 2016 by Border City Media founder Jim Lidestri, provides a state-of-the-art music analytics service that has revolutionized the way businesses analyze music consumption and related trends. The system incorporates the daily sales, streaming and airplay activity of albums, songs and artists.
Penske Media plans to leverage some of its key brands, chief among them Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline and IndieWire, to deepen the influence and expand exposure of the BuzzAngle charts in addition to creating custom charts for specific content verticals. The investment will also provide BuzzAngle a stronger financial foundation from which to grow.
The BuzzAngle investment was led by Michael Ye, Senior Director, Strategic Planning and Acquisition for PMC.
“We’re thrilled to announce our investment in BuzzAngle, and partnership with Jim and the team,” said Jay Penske, the founder, Chairman and CEO of PMC. “BuzzAngle has already accomplished many milestones — but as part of this new alliance, we will jointly push even more aggressively to make the charts an essential and central part of music, media and the entertainment industry.”
Music consumption, measured by streaming and multiple sales configurations, has become increasingly complicated to track, but provides the tools that deliver meaningful information that the music industry needs immediately. BuzzAngle’s arrival ushers in a time of quantifiable, instant data with which a music company can track even the most granular of metrics. BuzzAngle’s platform provides countless sorting options, such as daily album and song sales, streaming activity, and radio airplay, all of which can be broken out market by market. Its methodology allows for more than 10 trillion combinations of individualized reports for albums, songs, artists, labels and distributors.
“Penske Media is the perfect partner to help BuzzAngle fulfill the goals we set out to achieve at our founding,” said Lidestri. “The needed funding will accelerate product development and the reach of Variety and Rolling Stone will provide an unparalleled ability to bring charts and data analysis both to the music industry and to music fans worldwide.”
Since its launch, BuzzAngle has been the leading innovator in music-consumption analytics by being the first to offer daily updates; the first to develop a global platform; the first to develop a dashboard-driven system; the first to show streaming data at a market level; and the first to show both major and independent label and distributor market share based on streaming and total consumption. BuzzAngle is the only platform that allows users to create individualized reports on a daily basis, and in multiple countries.
PMC’s interest in BuzzAngle follows its December 2017 transaction with Wenner Media, the majority owner of Rolling Stone, the leading voice of music, politics and pop culture for 50 years.
