Over the past year, the convergence of data and music has become one of the hottest trends to sweep the industry. The competition is heating up as more streaming platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Spotify, and Apple Music have been releasing their own analytics dashboards to provide creators direct access to vital metrics they need to better manage their careers. While there is a plethora of data available, the true value of the numbers will only help bolster a creator’s career if they are properly dissecting it. At SXSW 2018, a few of the music industry’s influential leaders gathered on the Discovery Stage to share their insights to help artists leverage streaming analytics to calculate their worth and stay in control of their own careers.

The Problem: Creators Currently Rely On Vanity Streaming Metrics

Moderated by Natalie Robehmed from Forbes, the SXSW 2018 panel featured three industry moguls including, Roy LaManna (Vydia CEO & Co-Founder), Alex White (Next Big Sound Co-Founder & Head of Music Recommendations and Curation Programming at Pandora), and Jarred Goldner (Director of Artist Relations at Music Audience Exchange). The panelists agreed that creators who solely look at vanity metrics like audio streams, video views, or even social media followings are often misguided because they are only at the surface level of analytics.

The Solution: Leveraging Streaming Metrics That Matter The Most

Each panelist proceeded to give their own perspective about what metric they believe matters the most when measuring success. Alex White dove into the history of measuring data and how in a pre-streaming world, the most important metrics had dollar signs in front of them. Jarred Goldner elaborated that the metrics they focus on have to do with engagement. How many people are going to your shows, talking about you, sharing your content? The more people who are engaging with your content will move those dollar signs and get more people to pay attention. Vydia’s Roy LaManna jumped into the conversation and agreed that engagement is one of the best metrics to measure success. He revealed that there is a viral coefficient that creators should monitor: of all of the people that are streaming/viewing your content, how many are commenting, liking, or sharing with friends. LaManna explains that with today’s technology, it is easy to get your content in front of people, however, creators should focus on creating more compelling content, that will not only encourage viewers to watch but start an engaging conversation that can be shared across social media platforms. He stressed the importance of having a core and loyal fan base beneath the high view count. LaManna states, “Most importantly for any artist or creator, whether you’re in music or otherwise, is to focus on the idea that it doesn’t make sense to go from 0 to the entire world. Getting that core group of fans, which may not be the million of fans that everyone wants because they want that vanity metric, it just can’t be passed over.” Successful creators are able to gradually grow that core fanbase from a regional level to a national level, and eventually an international level.

Data Analytics at SXSW 2018

Looking Towards the Future of Data and the Music Industry

To close out the SXSW 2018 panel, LaManna, White, and Goldner each detailed what they think the future of data analytics looks like for musicians. Overall they agreed that we are still at the early stages of turning data into actionable insights and the next move is to further dissect the data to offer creators automatic and actionable insights and recommendations.

The future convergence of data analytics and video looks to be promising and exciting. Check out our additional SXSW panels by reading our blogs.