What Does All This Data Really Mean?
Panelists:
Lindsey Dodge, WME
Chaz Jenkins, Chartmetric
Alina Thompson, SiriusXM/Pandora
Moderated by:
Mike Lorenc, University of Michigan
What Data Means
Moderator Mike Lorenc challenged his experts to take a cue from this panel’s title and answer the question – what does data mean? For Chaz Jenkins, data means information and knowledge. Lindsey Dodge added that data is an artist’s power – that’s their business, their fans and how they learn about themselves and how to improve. And Alina Thompson answered, “Data means insight into human behavior – what people like, when they like it, how they like it.”
Jenkins considers data in three buckets: individual customer data (name, address, contact info), revenue data, and market data. He tends to focus on market data because it describes how customers are behaving – how they’re engaging with artists, how they’re listening to music, and how they’re sharing music. This data is widely and publicly available on streaming services. “It becomes really useful when you aggregate it,” he said. “No data is more valuable than any other data. Data is valuable when you combine in with other data – that’s when it is able to help you understand how consumers are behaving.”
Dodge agreed, “One source is no more important than another. You have to have a holistic view of an artist’s career – their trajectory, their growth, and their engagement growth over time. That’s what will tell you the full story. But it’s hard to compare two artists at the same point in time. You may have one artist who has been releasing music for ten years with a higher follower count and more streams versus one who has been around for two years. You have to look at the trends over time.” Dodge looks at streaming numbers, follower numbers, growth, and all of the social metrics. The most impactful data point to her is the growth trend – an artist’s growth trend on streaming and social platforms. “Growth across multiple, different areas is a much stronger indicator,” she said “If their followers are growing on social media and their streams are increasing across the board, that tells a better story. Historical data is important, especially if you’re looking at how a marketing campaign or a tour performed compared to the last one. You always want to have super fresh data and to always collect data. It’s important is to see the trajectory over time, the growth.”
Thompson added, “If you see the translation from one to the other, that’s going to be the first key indicator. You don’t always see growth in streaming translate to flourishing social media. Something going viral on socials doesn’t always translate to growth in streaming numbers. Growth in streaming or socials doesn’t always translate to hard ticket sales. If you can find two of those data points to match up and see significant growth at the same time, that’s going to be the first key indicator that something is starting to grow.” Lorenc added that he would also consider data on a macro level by including things you might read in a newspaper that are data driven – the unemployment rate, delinquency, different sentiments in an election year, and other factors that impact the macroeconomic environment. “The challenge,” he said, “is determining which data to prioritize.”
Driving Engagement Organically
Lorenc asked his panelists to explain the difference between hype – where something may blow up on streaming or social platforms – and trend lines and consistency that can make someone more comfortable to book an artist six months to a year down the line.
Jenkins advised, “I’ll restate – do not get distracted by a single platform or data set. All streaming services and social networks are deeply integrated – not digitally but by consumers. We all use multiple different platforms. Someone might discover new music on Spotify, then go to YouTube to watch an artist’s video, then post about the artist on a social network. Their friends may then share with other people and may listen in a different place. But, if something only grows on one platform, people really aren’t engaging. Growth in music has always been about sharing.” Jenkins worked with a festival booking team last year. To identify new artists to book for their smaller stages, they looked at Spotify stream counts and monthly listeners. “They were finding that some artists drew an audience and others who had millions of streams drew no audience at all,” he said. “That data is important, but it has no attribution. Did millions of people go to Spotify specifically to listen to that artist? Or did they happen to listen because the track was on a playlist? You don’t know. They focus now on engagement rates on social networks because that can help their marketing team. If the artist announces they’re going to be at the festival, there’s much more engagement from the artist’s fans. They’ll share and tell their other friends. Ultimately, the artist is more likely to draw an audience, and the marketing spend is likely going to be less. You have organic growth.” Lorenc agreed that engagement is critical. With digital and social media, fans feel that they have an intimate, almost one-to-one relationship with artists.
Lorenc discussed the acronym AIDA: Attention + Interest + Desire + Action. He stated, “Engagement is not just being aware. It’s liking something and wanting it.” Dodge is looking at artists’ socials and engagement over time and also around particular events, like a late-night show appearance. “Engagement can mean a lot of things – ticket sales history, how engaged the artist is in the marketing plan,” she explained. “If an artist is more hands-off and their team is running their socials, you may have an entirely different expectation of what fan engagement is going to look like. An artist who puts themselves out there and explains who they are to their fans is probably going to be able to connect more, sell more tickets, and have their overall number increase just because they’re actively connecting with their fans.”
“Social media is such a pathway for an artist’s voice and brand,” Thompson said. “It’s the easiest place for an artist to show up to build an authentic image of themselves and to communicate with the masses in a way that can feel one-to-one. The engagement you see there with likes and comments helps drive other factors like joining a fan club, buying a ticket, buying merch, or joining a livestream.” She also believes that people can tell when an artist is trying to build something that isn’t authentic. “It’s important that we’re invoking a feeling. All of the data and engagement comes back to a feeling. You want them to feel something for that artist, for that music, and for the story they’re telling. When you go to a live show, who is making you feel something there? That can make or break an artist on the live side.”
Jenkins added that engagement can be difficult to define and said, “There are lots of bits of data you can use to point toward engagement. Defining engagement is like trying to define love. It highlights the challenges and opportunities with data. Data is there to help you look at a situation and maybe understand it a bit better. It’s always open to interpretation and requires great analysis to really be able to tell a story with it, but data can never make decisions for you.”
Dodge added that understanding who you’re trying to market to is key for driving ticket sales. She elaborated, “You need to understand the demographics of a market’s audience, a venue’s audience, and an artist’s audience to know whether they match up or not. Going to a show and seeing how the fans react and if they’re singing the words to every song – regardless of how the songs are streaming or performing or how the artist’s socials are performing – is sometimes the most important metric.” Lorenc agreed, “Sometimes it’s a gut feeling or historical insights and sometimes you just know when you see something amazing. You look at the fans and you see the joy. The love of the product is already there. It’s just how you capture it and how you amplify it.”
Nuances Between Geographies
Thompson explained that the DSPs have heat maps for artists that show where the artist is over-indexing or under-indexing based on the number of listeners in that city. Artist teams have told her that they added dates in a city because they saw how heavily their artist was over-indexing on Pandora in that city. “That’s a good data point to start with,” she said.
“It’s not a direct science,” said Dodge. “Someone’s total streams in a direct market doesn’t mean that they will sell a certain number of tickets in that market. It’s more about if someone is overperforming or underperforming in a certain market compared to similar artists. There’s so much data out there and it can sometimes be overwhelming for people. Starting on a market level could be a good place to see how a market is performing compared to the entire country. But note that everyone’s top markets are generally going to be where there’s a majority of people – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc.”
Jenkins mentioned that geographic data isn’t going to be as informative as it was because we are all so connected now. “We can share with our friends all over the world. So, trends grow outwardly across geographic regions very quickly. There’s not really much localization in music anymore. In the past, country music’s audience could be relatively tightly combined geographically. Today, country music is listened to all over the world, the same as every other genre of music. If you’re looking to sign an artist in your country, look across the border. This is particularly important in places like Latin America and Southeast Asia because of their use of social networking.”
Who Owns the Data? Who Can Use the Data?
From a booking agency perspective, Dodge noted that they don’t own or look at first-party fan data like email addresses, phone numbers, etc. She said, “An interesting shift is going toward artists taking more ownership over data with fan clubs, QR codes and other data gathering activities.” She would love to have access to the demographics, brand affinities, and zip codes from that data to help make stronger booking decisions. While everyone can gather this information, they shouldn’t unless they invest in protecting and maintaining it. “There’s so much legislation and it’s only going to increase. If you have personal data about your fans and customers, you really have to invest in safeguarding it.” Most of the data Jenkins deals with is public data. It’s data that has been willingly made public. It doesn’t relate to individual personal information.
Jenkins restated that particular data is really isn’t useful until you combine it with other data. “TikTok is an incredibly valuable platform and its data is very useful, but it is widely misused,” he said. “Record companies were signing artists and festivals were booking artists just based on TikTok data. No one really goes to TikTok to listen to music. If you’re going to use data from a service, think about how people use that service.” He added that data from Wikipedia searches is informative, “People searching for artists is valuable because it helps identify if traditional media is influencing things in the digital world. Recently, Oasis announced that they were going to reform and go on tour. Overnight, they had more Wikipedia views than any other UK artist has had before. That ties to the press exposure. It drove an incredible spike in Google searches and landing on their Wikipedia page.”
Future Trends & Actionable Recommendations
“When I worked at Google, there was so much data,” Lorenc stated. “If someone started seeking out information about an artist, that can be extremely powerful information. If they go a step further and want to know when the artist is touring, that’s another great data point. Being able to market to them before you have to sell to them can be extremely powerful.”
Looking to the future, Thompson is interested in how AI may affect the landscape and what data points may be available from that. Lorenc noted that lots of AI has been used for years to analyze data sources. “Now we can start asking machines to help us predict. You can dump ticket sales for the last six months into ChatGPT and ask it to identify trends. Just know that you’re giving that proprietary information away, but the tradeoff might be very interesting,” he said. Chartmetric uses predictive marketing to analyze data so users can get better advice. They are also looking at ways to bring in more data, like weather data for example. In certain parts of the world, weather impacts music consumption and this information could be relevant for the live industry.
Dodge sees a huge trend in artists owning their own data and using it to their benefit. “An artist recently posted about his frustration with being at the mercy of the Instagram algorithm to announce his tour. If the artist and their marketing team have the power to reach their audience, it’s going to lead to a bit of a shift in the industry.”
“Social media is an ever-changing landscape,” said Thompson. “TikTok is very present in the music space and artists are using it create buzz and tease new releases. That wasn’t a conversation we were having 10 years ago. Watching the social media space and the new platforms that pop up and the behaviors they tap into with algorithms is interesting. TikTok led to people sitting around all day watching complete strangers. Social media trends can move very quickly.” Dodge noted that people “watch” TikTok and “check” Instagram. “It’s just a different behavior,” she said. “They go to TikTok to be entertained and go to Instagram to check on friends and to see what’s happening. Understanding the position of each platform and how people are using them is important to understanding the data you get from them.”
“Also consider listener engagement on streaming sources,” added Thompson. “Did they listen to an artist because they were on a playlist or were promoted on the platform? Or did they search out that artist? Understanding the type of listener who uses a particular platform is important. Pandora is very radio station based. They have on demand playlisting, but a lot of their consumption is radio stations. Spotify’s audience is more on demand listening based. That information can help you better understand the data from the platforms.”
“And try to understand what type of person is leaning in,” Jenkins advised. “Why do they like this artist? Is there other data that can help you understand that?”
“Data gives us information, but curiosity makes it useful,” Lorenc concluded. “Find other data that validates it. Understand why before you make a business decision based on data.”