{"id":798402,"date":"2019-08-09T10:01:14","date_gmt":"2019-08-09T16:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=868407"},"modified":"2019-08-09T10:01:14","modified_gmt":"2019-08-09T16:01:14","slug":"music-streamings-real-value-for-most-artists-is-data-not-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/music-streamings-real-value-for-most-artists-is-data-not-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Music Streaming\u2019s Real Value for Most Artists Is Data, Not Money"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When Metallica books a tour, the band doesn\u2019t just prepare to play its biggest hits in the biggest cities \u2014 it uses granular Spotify<\/a> data to tease out the specific preferences of its city-specific fanbases, tailoring set lists to location, Spotify\u2019s CEO Daniel Ek revealed on an earnings call last summer<\/a>. Ek was sharing the detail to highlight the success of Spotify for Artists, the company\u2019s analytics dashboard for musicians, which provides information such as playlist inclusion, streams by time period and geographic rankings of popularity.<\/p>\n

Not to be outdone by Spotify, rival service Apple Music<\/a> released Apple Music for Artists on Thursday \u2014 an analytics platform that had spent the last year in beta mode but is now available for all artists on the streaming service. The service offers detailed insights into music releases by metrics such as listener demographics, playlist inclusion trends, Shazam popularity and iTunes sales data, the latter two of which are Apple-exclusive data points. (The tech giant acquired Shazam at the end of 2017, and it is the only major streaming service connected to a download marketplace as well.) In a demo of the new software to Rolling Stone<\/em>, Apple representatives shared the many ways in which the data could be cut, noting that the hope is for artists to feel the experience is \u201clike having your own data scientist expert on call.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The new program can help break down listener info by city in over 100 countries, display top Shazamed cities and countries and automatically send alerts to users to notify them of streaming milestones, new playlist inclusions and other events that may be of use. It also moves from being desktop-only to existing in mobile form as well \u2014 something that clearly takes aim at Spotify for Artists\u2019 popular mobile app. In building more features into the tool, the creators of Apple Music for Artists consulted artists and managers on a scale from indie to mass-market, Apple says.<\/p>\n

As streaming becomes more and more of the centerpiece to artists\u2019 business strategies, so does the opportunity for streaming services to get closer to artists and their labels by sharing their information insights back to that user base. Several artist managers say that analytics platforms are essential to their business, and that major artists typically have at least one or two people who keep tabs on specific streaming figures and markets. Data \u201cis like a currency for you out there,\u201d Don VanCleave, a manager who works with musicians including Brent Cobb and Jessy Wilson, tells Rolling Stone. <\/em>\u201cWe are constantly using global information to get more business, especially talking to music supervisors, advertising executives \u2014 if you\u2019re trying to do a car ad in Belgium and you say \u2018that\u2019s our fifth biggest market, we\u2019ve got this many listeners there\u2019 and you can really break it down, you\u2019ve got a more compelling argument to get the attention of whoever you\u2019re pitching. Advertisers, brands, you name it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Cobb released his first record, VanCleave says, he noticed that it was streaming particularly well in cities like Helsinki and took that data to agents to schedule shows in the Nordic region. He adds that he checks various analytics \u201cat least weekly\u201d and has found the Spotify for Artists mobile app useful for pulling up a stat or two on his phone in a business dinner: \u201cIf you\u2019re talking to a promoter or agent, it\u2019s really helpful to have all that right at your fingertips.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, in line with the intensely competitive nature of the music streaming<\/a> market, it\u2019s not just Spotify and Apple Music occupying the analytics space: other companies such as Internet-radio service Pandora<\/a> and data analytics platform Chartmetric have built viable businesses helping artists glean an understanding of their audiences through data. Spotify for Artists and Apple Music for Artists are both free at the moment \u2014 but it doesn\u2019t appear likely that both will remain that way. \u201cWe\u2019ve never before been at a place in time where you could make as many informed decisions and understand your audience as well as we can do now as an artist,\u201d Ek said last year, about Metallica and other bands that use streaming analytics to inform their business decisions. A year later, in its latest quarterly call with investors, Spotify hinted that it is actively building out provisions in its new label licensing negotiations for a \u201ctwo-sided marketplace\u201d in which it could charge artists and labels<\/a> for currently-gratis analytics services.<\/p>\n

The value in the data points provided by streaming services is clear. (\u201cYou can be streaming a lot but not selling tickets because you\u2019re not connecting the dots to fans,\u201d VanCleave points out.) What\u2019s yet unknown is the exact dollar amount that could, or should, be placed on it.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Metallica books a tour, the band doesn\u2019t just prepare to play its biggest hits in the biggest cities \u2014 it uses granular Spotify data to tease out the specific preferences of its city-specific fanbases, tailoring set lists to location, Spotify\u2019s CEO Daniel Ek revealed on an earnings call last summer. Ek was sharing the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-798402","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-18 13:17:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}