Music Ally

Just as the internet can be used for distributing and marketing music, it can also be used as a source of data to assess the effectiveness of your marketing activities. So far this week we have spoken to Eric Garland of Big Champagne and Alan Ault of WaveMetrix for their views on how metrics are shaping up for entertainment online.

Now, in the third of a five part series, we interview Marie-Alicia Chang and Gregory Mead, co-founders of UK startup MusicMetric, which aims to bring access to high-end internet metrics to music artists, labels and managers of all size.

Marie-Alicia and Gregory’s comments can be found as part of an extensive feature in the current Music Ally Report; to read the magazine, log inor sign up for a free trial. Continue reading after the jump for our illuminating interview with MusicMetric.

How do you describe what MusicMetric offers?

Marie-Alicia Chang:

Musicmetric has created a suite of desktop tools that provide unrivalled insights into online data and trends for the music industry. Tools that actually pinpoint why change is happening, and not just by how much.

We aim to give a comprehensive view of the online environment so that the industry can unlock and exploit more of the opportunities created by social media. We believe that less ambiguity surrounding the effectiveness of marketing activity, combined with better real-time analysis, simplifies decision making around promotional strategies.

The Musicmetric product answers this complex problem by using its proprietary algorithms and software to crawl millions of web sources containing user preference and activity data. It ranks their influence and collects numerical data, then scrutinises text using a range of cutting edge semantic and opinion mining tools.

What kind of technology is being used for that?

Gregory Mead:

We offer data on plays happening across a range of social networks. This kind of information can be available for free on some services but it doesn’t go back far and the information isn’t available on an hourly resolution.

We also have BitTorrent data tracking.

We offer fan demographics on ages, which is a byproduct of our large scale data mining – our crawlers trawling web millions of pages. We pick out information to figure out the age and name and you can work out probability of male or female from that.

At the moment it’s just music as our crawlers, sentiment engine and disambiguation systems are trained for music. For example we can disambiguate between an artist and a random word. Let’s say if you had Oasis the band – we can tell if they’re talking about a band called oasis or a shop or a bar called Oasis. We can even differentiate between two artists with the same name.

It’s totally automated, very scaleable and we are scaling up, tracking 500,000 artists and eight million releases.

Can you measure what’s happening on Twitter?

Marie-Alicia Chang:

Indeed. If you look at the Musicmetric application, we have various metrics related to Twitter coverage and influence ranking for artists and their followers. Our influence algorithm looks at how people are linked, it’s not just based on how many followers people have but on the influence of their followers and on and on through the network. Ten highly influential followers is more important than 100,000 random people.

How does the pricing work?

Marie-Alicia Chang:

We have an Essentials product which is for DIY artists, small labels, it costs £50 a month but we’ll also be offering it as a bolt-on to other artist-related services (though we can’t yet give away who we’re partnering with.)

There’s also a Professional version of the app with more functions for indie labels and larger management companies – allowing you to drill down into what’s happening in a city, viewing downloads and p2p action, for example.

Then we have Enterprise which is similar to the functionality of Pro, but allows customisation and it enables you to track over 500 artists per seat. It’s a second generation marketing tool, A&R tool, finance cutting tool – farmore than just a research tool.

Increased pressure on the music industry means there is increasing scrutiny on marketing budgets. And because the music business spreads budgets thin to capture zeitgeist, using pluggers and PR, it’s often hard to know which are leaking money and which create value. I have been told it’s normal for labels to be covering five or six areas to make sure they have covered their bases. But with the information we provide, it might not be necessary to splurge on everything to enhance promotion if labels can see how to spend tactically and strategically.

What about the future?

Marie-Alicia Chang:

This is our first full release and we have so much in the pipeline – we have some great insiders working for us, with Jeremy Silver just joining us as Chairman of the board, all pointing us in the right direction.

In terms of future partnerships, because technologically we have the ability to do what we say we do, we are very ambitious about the scope of things to come. In a lot of the conversations we’ve had with record labels they have been surprised at how comprehensive it is.

Tags: gregory mead, marie alicia chang, measurement, metrics, music metric, musicmetric

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.