The Importance Of Data Collection And How the Music Industry Can Benefit From It!
The digital revolution has rocked the music business for more than a decade, changing the way we buy, play and discover new music. In this post, I’ll show you the importance of data collection in the music industry and how this process can help new bands to outreach their upcoming consumers the right way.
Music Listeners Demographics
Bob Dylan said that the times were a changing in the mid-1960’s. Truer today than he, or anyone could have dreamed of, the world of the musician is in a state of transition. Driven, in part, by emerging data-collection technology, the music industry is working to use data to get benefit from it. Since big data can reveal consumers’ inspiration behind their music choices, connecting social media context with its user behavior can even reveal the “music DNA” for specific demographics. In other words, this information helps in implementing powerful engagement strategies and enable artists to offer music based in it.
Multiple Floods of Information
MusicMetric is not the only company crunching the data. In March, Spotify acquired a music analytics company in the US called The Echo Nest, for a rumored $100 million (£59,718,616) in order to beef up its music discovery services, while the competitor Next Big Sound by Forbes was dubbed “Moneyball for Music”. In just a short few years, the music industry has woken up to examine social signals more rigorously as they proved to be helpful for getting inside information.
Data Will Save Music
There are a lot of music companies out there that have loads of data about music lovers that they are willing to share. Spotify can track songs across social graphs. Shazam can give us situational data like where someone is listening to a song, how, when, and even why. YouTube can easily help us track the growth of a song using streams and search analysis. Even Vine and Instagram are becoming hotbeds for music discovery. Many of these platforms are willing to share data with us. They tell the story of how they have helped Artist X to grow from zero to superstar.
Big Data Collection Music Companies
Pandora, Spotify, iHeart Radio and numerous others have significantly altered music distribution and artist discovery. Customizing the experience for users based on their on-platform actions and song preferences. And they do this via big data. Each day, more than 600 GB of data is created by Spotify users as they share, listen and create playlist of the songs and also when they use in platform apps like Tunigo. But this is not only limited to Spotify nowadays every major music app does it.
Taking Aim with Targeted Ads
Another way in which data impacts the music industry is through targeted advertising. YouTube recently launched their highly anticipated subscription-based music service essentially to solve their advertising overload problem, which isn’t scalable. How many more ads can YouTube possibly fit into those screens? But by stepping into the subscription space, they are taking a huge step backward toward what hasn’t proved helpful for Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and others.
Conclusion
The explosion of data from sources like torrenting, song streaming sites, music apps and social media platforms has offered the music industry a huge opportunity to understand their fans unique motivations and showcase only the songs they’re interested in. This data can be proved to be a valuable resource for upcoming artists to easily track their success before they even jump into the industry.
