The music industry has data spilling out of its earholes in 2013: Likes, tweets, plays, views, followers, subscribers… There is more data available on how people are discovering, listening to and sharing music than ever before. But the real challenge is making sense of it.
At AIM’s Music Connected conference in London today, a panel drawn from the independent music community talked about their experiences. The panel comprised Sammy Andrews of Cooking Vinyl, Ben Rimmer of Believe Digital and Grant Bussinger of Warp Records. The moderator was Million Media’s Neil Cartwright.
“Did you know, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years? And the amount of data in the world doubles every 18 months,” said Cartwright, as an introduction.
“Every minute we create 204 million emails. There are two million Google searches per minute. 48 hours of YouTube video uploaded every minute… Why does all this matter? There are going to be enormous opportunities: enormous job opportunities, enormous growth opportunities for companies who can get that data and use it properly. It’s going to affect all of us, not just in music, but in our daily life.”
The panel were asked to define Big Data. “It’s exactly what it says on the tin. It’s large amounts of information,” said Andrews. ”We have access to more of it than ever before, and advanced software and analytics to process it and make decisions based on it.”
How can music capitalise? “We kind of already are through sales data and recommendation data and Spotify and the other streaming sites. There’s more available to us than there has ever been before, and there’s only gong to become more available,” she said, stressing that one big question now is ensuring it’s made available to artists, not just labels.
“For me, I describe Big Data as every measurable aspect of business intelligence… and how it relates to each other,” said Bussinger. “It all links together for us,” agreed Rimmer, who warned of the risks of spending all day trying to make sense of data, rather than acting on its lessons.
“We want tools that can actually drill that down into usable data so that we can use that to sell records and run the business in the best way for our labels,” he said, of Believe’s distribution business.
What data actually matters to labels? Andrews talked about tools for aggregating different sources of data: for example bringing ticket sales data together with sales and streaming figures. But she also warned indie labels not to forget about the basics.
“Please go away and look at Google Analytics! You’re missing a trick: that’s a free tool… whether you’re a management or label, whoever it is. You should be tracking your website data,” she said.
“It can be simple things like geolocation data. We can far far better plan tours and see where we want to send stock if we know where artists have a fanbase… We used to say ‘we think we have some fans and played a gig here once and it went alright…’ but you don’t have to do that any more.”
She noted that the big issue is that people often look at just a “tiny part” of data, rather than cross-referencing with other sources – Twitter and Facebook for example – to see the bigger picture.
Bussinger talked about the costs of acquiring data as a music company. “We found that some of these larger analytics aggregators – the ones that take them from all the different sources… and put them all together and display it for you in a great way – they become very expensive, especially for the music industry,” he said.
“I’ve tried to look outside of the music industry and those products.” He cited a product called SumAll that fulfils a similar aggregation role: not just Likes, comments and shares, but also sentiment.
“Whether or not the swarm actually likes content that we’re putting out there. SumAll does that and a few other services do it as well,” he said. “It’s really a black magic right now… It seems to be pretty effective in saying ‘oh, these keywords or this topic on the internet, we can figure out if it has good sentiment or bad sentiment, or any measurement in between’.”
How is Warp using that data? “We would be remiss to ignore it, but I don’t think we’re using that specific data point to influence decisions just yet, because it is so new.”
Rimmer talked about the way Believe monitors iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and Amazon sales or streams on a daily basis, to see how effective its other campaigns are in close-to real-time.
“We want to know if Facebook or Twitter or Google ads or preroll banners on YouTube, which is working best. And that does pretty much give you instant data back on the effectiveness of those campaigns, so we can quickly divert money.”
He cited one example of an artist whose song was played in TV show Made in Chelsea: advertising that fact to the artist’s existing fans on Facebook wasn’t very effective – “they weren’t impressed!” – but targeting Made in Chelsea fans on Twitter worked very well.
“There are so many tools available to us, and there are more emerging every day. This is an exciting time in our industry,” said Andrews. “It’s taken a while for the industry to grasp the digital world… but it’s here, and there’s so many tools available.”
Cartwright asked about Warner Music Group’s recent deal with Shazam, which involves setting up a Shazam label imprint to sign artists that are being tagged a lot, while also feeding Shazam’s data on WMG artists into the label’s marketing teams.
How does big data complement traditional A&R, rather than replacing it? “We should still, I feel, in this industry be able to take a punt on people now and again. Some of the best bands we’ve put out is because one guy sat in a room and said ‘no one gets this. No one gets this at all. But I still want to do it!’,” said Andrews.
But she went on to say big data CAN play a role in the A&R process. “Shazam and Spotify are influencing decisions now. It’s not just with A&R,” she said, citing radio playlisters as a key example. “It is a predictive tool now, and we’d be idiots not to look at that data. We’re going to see more and more of it.”
“I think we should trust our A&R: this is what they do. They’re on the beat, they’re on the streets… and we should use the data available to us to support them and the decisions they make,” said Bussinger. “This is still a creative industry. We don’t want to take something so inherently uncreative as data and push down our creative and our artists’ choices… At Warp, we take the data to support the art. The art is always paramount.”
What about decisions like what should be put out as a single? Bussinger was asked if he’d argue against an A&R on that kind of choice, based on data. “I would, but I wouldn’t necessarily win that argument!” he laughed. “But it’s not always so disparate: where the A&R says one thing and the data says another. A lot of times, it is the same. We work together a lot.”
“Without the human element, maybe the major labels will go down that route more. They literally want something that’s going to ell. But our labels, their brand is very important. They don’t just want to release something that will sell a million copies. If you go down that route, it’s literally just a business,” said Rimmer.
“I think everyone that works in independents cares about the music. If you do have people who actually believe in that project, that band will probably be more successful than it would have been had they signed somewhere that only signed them based on what the data says.”
Cartwright wondered whether data always tells the truth: from Facebook Likes to YouTube views. Aren’t there always going to be people playing fast and loose with data, finding ways to make something seem more popular than it is?
Andrews and Rimmer talked about YouTube’s recent efforts to crack down on fraudulent view-counts, praising. Facebook? Less so: both acknowledged the growth in Like-fraud in recent times, while warning that it’s not a good idea at all.
“We’ve had artists that have tried that, and in the end it’s wholly unsuccessful. In the short term they may get signed for distribution or get better gigs booked, but eventually they get found out,” said Rimmer.
Andrews agreed, noting that if a Western band’s Facebook fanbase are unusually skewed to “14 year-old girls in India or Turkey” it’s a red flag. “You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you do that, because you’re corrupting your own data,” she added. Buy thousands of fake Likes, and when the time comes to run Facebook marketing campaigns, you’ll be wasting money.
“Buying Likes is bad!” said Bussinger. But is there pressure on artists and labels to indulge in these practices in order to, for example, secure radio play.
“People do feel the pressure, but people need to look further into just producing good content,” said Andrews, suggesting that music companies and artists need to be thinking about what kind of content will work well on digital services, and thus drive likes, follows, views and streams organically rather than artificially.
“Rather than sit and look at buying Likes, people should be sitting down and saying ‘how do we drive this?’. And a lot of bands out there are lazy… but more and more bands are understanding the importance of putting content out… There’s a lot to be gained from us as independents in working more closely with our artists on how to build the fanbases, and therefore how to drive the sales.”
Should labels be working harder to turn all these likes, follows and views into data that they own – email addresses for mailing lists, for example.
“Al these platforms: we don’t own that data! They’re platforms where we are collecting people for other corporations to sell advertising,” said Andrews. “The ultimate goal with all of these social networks should be really to turn that into your own data: whether emails or gig tickets. But getting that data.”
She cited Myspace as a cautionary tale in that regard: when the site was relaunched, artists lost all their old ‘friends’ on the platform, and had to start from scratch.
“MySpace is a brilliant example: that fucked off overnight! And Facebook… it’s perfectly possible that Facebook might do the same tomorrow. We should be trying to get email addresses… It’s really important to make that conversion, and we should all be looking to do it more,” she said.
“We are driving people to these sites, making them a lot of money, and they are charging us for the data that we’ve driven for them.. We should be having more conversations about how we can open up access to that data.”
Bussinger agreed that independent labels should be thinking about owning as much data as possible. “It’s always a goal bringing them back into that conversion cycle. Bringing them back into our own community,” he said. “We want to be close to our fans, and we don’t necessarily want Facenook and Twitter and Google to be that conduit. We want to be close to them.”
