Ever since Spotify did a deal with Songkick to promote ticket sales within its service, we’ve wondered how big those sales are – and that’s a question that extended to merchandise sales too when the company introduced those, initially with Topspin and then with BandPage.
Well, no answers just yet, but BandPage has been giving a few numbers around that side of its business. For example? It’s now distributing more than 3m individual items of merch for artists through partnerships with Spotify and Rhapsody, as well as Shazam and LyricFind.
The company adds that musicians’ offers distributed through its network get average click-through rates “five times higher than typical online channels”, and conversion rates “up to three times higher than online retailer averages”, with some artists making “upwards of $1,000 per day” through its network.
“While the conversation today is often focused on streaming music revenues, monetising the engagement around the stream represents a massive new revenue opportunity for our industry and we are starting to see the data to prove it,” said BandPage CEO J Sider.
BandPage’s efforts in this area shouldn’t be underestimated. We’ll hope for some more data on aggregate dollar amounts in 2015, to understand the true scale of this part of the music market, and ticketing too.
On Spotify, merch and artist offers remain confined to artist profiles, which suggests there may be a much larger opportunity for artists if it can find a way to unintrusively break them out into other parts of its apps.
As we’ve suggested before, there’s also a completely-untapped opportunity to forge better links between streaming and crowdfunding. None of this would make much difference to a streaming service’s bottom line, but in artist-relations terms, it can be invaluable.
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