Can Big Data Help Artists Make Smarter Choices?

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In this episode of the Upward Spiral, a music business podcast, we talk to Daniel Savage, who leads North American operations for Musicmetric, a startup which offers behavioral data for the music industry. He gives us his perspective on the Iron Maiden story that recently made headlines around the interwebs and what role behavioral data plays in helping artists make decisions.

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KEY QUOTE:

It's a really interesting landscape right now. As I said, I do think that there is a data literacy gap in our business. We are doing our best to fill that gap. We are trying to make our data as actionable and as contextual as possible, so that we can reduce the data to some key points that will help people make better decisions; and just generally speaking to reduce the amount of ‘data noise’ — if you will — out there.

One of the interesting things about our business is
that it’s only getting more and more complex. Right? There
used to be a very prescribed path in a way, where you
would sign to a label, they would try to get your song in the
radio, you would go on tour, you would hope that you
would get three and a half stars in Rolling Stone, and
then you would move on and make your next record, etc.

Now, with the advent of the web, social media, streaming services, and different touring possibilities, there are so many different ways to go and so many different possibilities that it has really become an extremely complex business, if you think about it, much more complex than it used to be.

Our argument is that as the business becomes more and more complex, it calls for increasing levels of sophistication in how people that are working with artists are viewing consumer engagement and consumer behavior. We definitely feel like we have a part to play in that whole process.

— Daniel Savage | @danielsavage64
EVP, North America at Musicmetric

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